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THE 



COVENANT OF PEACE 



BY 



MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D., 

A utkor of 
" GATES INTO THE PSALM COUNTRY," ETC. 




NEW YORK: 
ANSON D, F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY, 

38 WEST TWENT5f-THIRD STREET. 



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Copyright, 1887, by 
Anson D. F. Randolph & Company. 



edward o. jenkins' sons, 

Printers and Stereotypers, 

20 North William Street, New York. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



This volume, which is published by special request, 
is addressed principally to Christian believers. It does 
not discuss disputed questions in theology, or issues be- 
tween science and religion, nor is it an attempt to re- 
state the truths of the Gospel in the terms of modern 
science. It endeavors to deal, in a direct and practical 
fashion, with certain hard, painful, and puzzling phases 
of Christian experience, and with certain mischievous 
mistakes in popular Christian conceptions of duty and 
of privilege. It is for the tempted, the unsuccessful, the 
discouraged, and the weary : for souls fighting for life 
and victory under the burden of infirmity and the sting 
of sorrow. The sermons are the outgrowth of a pastor's 
experience. They are printed substantially as they were 
delivered, without any attempt to eliminate their collo- 
quialisms, or to convert them into finished specimens of 
sermon-rhetoric. 



(iii) 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. — The Mountains and God's Kindness, . . i 

II. — The Seed of Light, 18 

III.— The Promise of Godliness for the Present 

Life, 33 

IV. — From Beyond Jordan, 50 

V. — Creating and Carrying 66 

VI. — The Refuge from Talk, 81 

VII. — Strength in Weakness, . . . .96 

VIII. — Between Sowing and Harvest, . . .111 

IX. — The Eternal Guide, 126 

X. — Knowing by Doing, 143 

XI. — God Greater than our Heart, . 160 

XII. — Sonship the Foreshadowing of Heaven, . 175 

XIII. — The God of the Unsuccessful, . . .191 

XIV. — Maiming and Life, . 206 

XV. — Detaching, 219 

XVI. — The Kinghood of Patience, .... 234 

XVII. — Jehovah Ropheka, 252 

XVIII. — Self-Winning, 269 

XIX.— The Cankered Years, 285 

XX. — The Goodness of God in the Land of the 

Living, 301 

(v) 



I. 

THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 

"For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be 
removed, but my kindness shall not depart from 
thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be re- 
moved, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee'* 
— ISA. liv. 10. 

GOD in Scripture frequently uses nature to illustrate 
grace. What is still more remarkable, He uses often the 
sterner aspects of nature, those with which power and 
terror are associated, to illustrate or to emphasize His 
tenderness and love toward His children. The He- 
brews, for instance, did not like the sea. You will find 
the sea in their writings employed as an emblem of ter- 
ror and distress. Yet we hear the Psalmist saying, " The 
sea is His and He made it. O come, let us worship and 
bow down ; we are the people of His pasture and the 
sheep of His hand. Let us come before His presence 
with thanksgiving." The forty-second Psalm is a psalm 
of distress and longing. It is set in the key of a stormy 
ocean. In it is heard the sound of the floods. " Deep 
calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy waterspouts. All 
Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over me." But out 
of the noise of the waves comes a voice of hope and 
cheerful trust. " Yet the Lord will command His lov- 
ing-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song 



2 THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 

shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my 
life. Hope thou in God. I shall yet praise Him who is 
the health of my countenance and my God." 

The mountains are symbols of this sterner character. 
The)' suggest power and fixedness and duration, rather 
than Love and gentleness. When associated with God, 

they are used to suggest His might and His eternity. 
They are called " the everlasting hills." To shake them 
implies more than human power. By His strength God 
ct setteth fast the mountains, being girded with power.*' 
When lie appears in His majesty, " the perpetual hills do 
bow." Yet the mountains are used, as in this text, to set 
forth to us the loving-kindness of God. What we should 
naturally suppose would repel, or at least awe us into 
silence and helplessness, becomes, in the hands of in- 
spiration, full of attraction, invitation, and rest. The 
mountains bring peace. 

And this association of ideas is neither forced nor arbi- 
trary. The apparent contradiction, as we go deeper 
down, resolves itself into a beautiful harmony of thought. 
For weakness naturally betakes itself, not to beauty, but 
to power. Helplessness seeks the shadow of true maj- 
esty. True spiritual discernment detects the greatest 
tenderness in real strength. Hence it was most deeply 
natural for the pilgrim in the desert, as the night drew 
on and the sense of its terrors and mysterious dangers 
forced itself upon his mind, to say, "I will lift up mine 
eyes unto the hills. Whence should my help come?" 
God is a God of might. He made heaven and earth; 
but for that very reason my help cometh from Him. 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GO US KINDNESS. 3 

He that keepeth me will not slumber. He shall pre- 
serve my going out and my coming in. 

In the light of these general truths we are to read our 
text to-day. This chapter of the prophet Isaiah is full 
of comfort and 'hope. Its burden is consolation to the 
afflicted people of God ; and here, therefore, the moun- 
tains and the hills are introduced, this time by way of 
contrast with the immutability of divine love and kind- 
ness. These vast masses which divine power has heaved 
up and set fast, which symbolize to human minds eter- 
nal power and stability, which seem to stand fast forever 
— these great bulks of nature are mutable and transitory 
compared with the eternal love and tenderness of Jeho- 
vah. In days of calamity, when the enemy sweeps over 
the plains and lays waste the homes of men, when the 
torrents break their banks and overflow the pleasant 
corn-lands, men flee to the mountains as to a friendly 
and inaccessible shelter. But even the mountains are 
not eternal. The mountains shall depart, and the hills 
be removed ; but my kindness is beyond the reach of 
all convulsion or change. " My kindness shall not depart 
from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be re- 
moved." Thus saith the Lord that setteth fast the moun- 
tains ; at whose touch they melt. He is the Lord that 
hath mercy on thee. 

Possibly the prophet was not embodying a mere fancy 
when he uttered this comparison. Job spoke of a natu- 
ral fact when he said, " Surely the mountain, falling, 
cometh to naught, and the rock is removed out of his 
place." In volcanic regions such as that in which Job 



4 THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 

lived, a mountain, undermined by subterraneous fires, 
often falls in and crumbles away, and the earthquake 
shakes and shatters the solid rocks. The simple doc- 
trine of our text, then, is that God's kindness is like Him- 
self, immutable. That however nature may change and 
decay, as it does change and decay, though the world 
itself pass away, as it does pass away, God's kindness to 
His children is above all these changes and abides for- 
ever. 

Now as I have said, this is not a surface truth ; and 
that is the reason why it is urged and emphasized in so 
many forms in Scripture. Naturally I think we tend to 
reason the other way, and to ascribe to nature a perma- 
nency which we see, or think we see, is denied to man. 
Do we not often find ourselves musing after this fashion, 
as we stand in the presence of nature's vastness : " That 
ocean ! I shall be gone soon, and the places which 
know me so well will forget me, but those tides will 
continue to flow ; those surges will break on the cliffs, 
those billows will bear the stately ships, long after I 
shall have gone. Those mountains will lift themselves 
toward heaven, those streams will continue to flow, those 
trees will stretch out their arms, and the spring shall 
clothe them with green and the autumn with purple 
and gold, when I shall have returned to dust. That sun 
will shine still : those stars will continue to look down 
from their serene heights : the earth will be running its 
round, and seed-time and harvest coming at their ap- 
pointed seasons, when the last trace of this which now 
loves and hopes and strives shall have vanished." Truly 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 5 

it seems as if it is the natural and material that abides: 
as though God's care over one were short-lived. I live 
fourscore years or less. That mountain-peak has stood 
in its majesty from the day the morning stars sang to- 
gether. My work is fragmentary and short-lived : but 
those rocky buttresses which nature piles up, those 
growths which strike their branching roots out and 
down into the bosom of the earth, those abysses filled 
with the briny floods — they abide. What a trifle I am 
beside a single Alpine peak, the lowest of them. A sin- 
gle rock from that mass, a mere speck compared with 
its total bulk, rolls down and crushes me out of life in 
an instant. A mass of snow comes down and I disap- 
pear forever. I, with mind and will and thought, I 
who can plan and hope and aspire, I am worse than 
helpless in the grasp of that brute bulk of water, pressed 
on by the power of gravity to leap over yonder preci- 
pice and break in idle foam on the rocks below. 

That is the way our thought shapes itself ofttimes. 
It is not so unreasonable either at the first glance. It 
looks as though God cared more for matter than for 
spirit. 

And I may pause to say here that that kind of rea- 
soning (if it be reasoning) is legitimate, I fear conclu- 
sive, if the theories of modern materialism are true 
which go to identify spirit with matter, and soul with 
body. If I am of one piece with the mountains and 
trees, it is humiliating enough to know that I do not 
last as long as they do : that God has far less care for 
perpetuating my thinking personality than He has for 



6 THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 

perpetuating a heap of rocky layers or a huge mass of 
waters. If that position is the true one, then I must 
adjust the demands and emergencies of a nature capable 
of desire and hope and suffering to these rigid lines of 
matter as best I can. I have no hope beyond my brief 
connection with the economy of sea and mountain and 
forest. It is a little matter that I am to live in my in- 
fluence, as the philosophers of this school tell me. How 
much does my influence count on beings who are going 
down to the dust like myself and of whom the dust is 
the end ? It may make their brief day perhaps a little 
brighter or happier, but truly that hardly seems worth 
all the effort and struggle and repression which go to 
build up character, if annihilation is the end of the race. 
At any rate that does not satisfy or comfort me. Some- 
how I am so made that an immortality (if it be an im- 
mortality) of influence, impersonal influence, does not 
satisfy me. Something in me craves personal life pro- 
longed and widened. I want eternity. Perhaps it is a 
presumptuous and conceited craving. Be it so. I only 
know it is there ; and with Augustine I say, " My soul 
is restless until it repose in God." 

Now you see that Scripture leads us away from all 
such musings and all such conclusions as those : and it 
does so, moreover, with a clear recognition, and a clear 
showing of all the facts in the case. For nowhere more 
plainly and emphatically than in Scripture is the frailty 
and the transitoriness of man set forth. Look at the 
ninetieth Psalm. There are the mountains again, those 
savage, purple cliffs on which Moses gazed, and turned 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. y 

from them to see a generation dying in the wilderness. 
They are thrown into contrast with the eternity of God 
on the one hand, but on the other hand with the mortal- 
ity of man. " Thou turnest man to destruction, and say- 
est, l Return, ye children of men.' Thou earliest them 
away as with a flood : they arc as a sleep in the morn- 
ing : they are like grass which groweth up and pcrish- 
eth in a day. The days of our years arc soon cut off 
and we fly away." So the apostle takes up the same 
theme. " What is your life ? It is even as a vapor." 
And the prophet answers out of the past: "All flesh is 
grass, and all the goodlincss thereof is as the flower of 
the field." You can easily multiply these utterances of 
Scripture. 

But, on the other hand, in full view of this fact, 
nothing is so emphatic as Scripture in setting forth 
the eternal hope and rich promise which attaches to 
man, and the peculiar and high place which he holds 
in the eye of God. This Bible centres in him. It is 
made for him with its wealth of instruction and promise 
and consolation. There is an eye from heaven ever 
directed upon him ; a hand stretched forth from heaven 
to guide and to uphold him. God takes upon Himself the 
conduct of His child's life. He leaves to no one inferior 
to Himself 1 lie regulation of his ways. "The steps of 
a good man are ordered of the Lord. Though he fall 
he shall not be utterly east down, for the Lord uphold-* 
eth him with His hand." Exposed to sin and its 
seductions and consequences, God interposes in his be- 
half with a gigantic scheme of redemption. From the 



8 THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 

very beginning God is at work to save him and to recon- 
cile him to Himself. For him God becomes manifest in 
the flesh. For him that wondrous, perfect life of the 
divine Son puts itself alongside of his littleness, his sin, 
his sorrow. Christ is the incarnation of the truth that 
manhood means an essential and eternal connection with 
God. For him are all the history and all the utterances 
of prophets and kings. Through his feeble instrumen- 
tality God has been pleased to work out great and 
abiding results. God has honored him with high com- 
missions and vindicated him with decisive victories, and 
made him the herald of messages pregnant with life and 
hope to his kind. What privileges He has bestowed 
upon him : to know God, to love God, to commune with 
God, to be filled with His fulness, to enjoy His fellow- 
ship. For him is the promise of immortality ; of seeing 
God as He is ; of being changed into God's image ; of 
enjoying an eternity of divine fellowship and divine 
ministry. The facts of human frailty and of the brevity 
of human life, are offset with the promise of eternal life. 
Death is confronted with resurrection. The world does 
indeed pass away, "but he that doeth the will of God 
abideth forever." In the light of these facts, is not the 
kindness of God shown to be stronger and more endur- 
ing than the hills? Does not the spirit of man, after 
all, appear to be, in His eyes, of more account than mat- 
ter? It is only the world that passeth away. God's 
son and heir does not pass away. He is longer-lived 
than the hills. He serves a higher purpose : he is the 
subject of a larger divine intent : he has a higher destiny. 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. g 

But in this part of the text God's eternal kindness is 
shown by comparison and contrast. In the second part 
of the text it is stated directly and absolutely, and in 
legal terms. It is put as a matter of agreement. God 
binds Himself to be eternally kind to His children, by a 
covenant of peace. This covenant is to stand forever. 
" It shall not totter" (to translate literally). My cove- 
nant of peace shall not be removed. It is a wonderful 
thought. Jehovah enters into a compact of eternal lov- 
ing-kindness. Let us look at some sides of it. 

In the first place, there is something very suggestive in 
that word " kindness." Kindness is originally that which 
is felt and shown to one's kind or kin. Kind is kinned ; 
so that, according to the primitive signification of the 
word, kindness grows out of natural relationship. And 
this is really the basis of God's kindness. Men are His 
children : and the relation of parent and child implies 
kindness. And so Adam, when he came fresh from the 
hand of God, was compassed about with the divine 
kindness. Blessings poured upon him from the heavens. 
God came down and walked and communed with him 
in the paradise which He had made for him. There was 
an agreement or covenant implied in that relation, just 
as there is in the filial and parental relation everywhere : 
an agreement to the effect that the son, by receiving 
and enjoying his father's gifts, is bound to loyalty and 
obedience : but as long as the son lives in loyalty and 
love, the legal aspect of the relation falls into the back- 
ground. When man, by disobedience, forfeited his privi- 
leges as a son of God, violated the sacredness of the 



10 THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD 'S KINDNESS. 

original filial relation, God's kindness did not depart from 
him. He did not cease to be a son, though he was an 
erring and straying son. God was, from the very first, 
untiring in His effort to win him back to allegiance and 
love. The fact that he was a son of God and made in 
God's image was never lost out of sight in the divine 
counsels. Sin did not drive God out of the world. It 
set Him working in the world (if we may reverently cast 
the thought into this form) under new manifestations. 
It inaugurated the economy of reconciliation. And 
thus it brought into prominence necessarily the legal 
aspect of the relation between God and man ; for wher- 
ever there is sin, there law asserts itself. And so from 
the sweet, natural, harmonious intercourse of God and 
man, where the kindness of fatherly love was met by 
filial love and obedience, we pass into an economy of 
invitations, promises, entreaties, covenants : we feel the 
strain of the chords at which man is obstinately pulling 
in the endeavor to break away from God, and the tension 
from God's side as He endeavors to hold him and to draw 
him back to Himself. Man has learned to distrust God's 
kindness. Hence God asserts it. Man has forgotten 
his obligations. God emphasizes them in formal laws. 
And yet, behind all law and ordinances, is felt the deep, 
strong pulsation of divine love and fatherly yearning, 
as if God were saying to the recreant and rebellious race, 
" Only see here ! See what I am ready to do for you ! 
See what power I have to enrich and bless you ! 
See how I love you ! I yearn to be kind to you. My 
love is like a great tide that chafes against its banks and 



. THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. n 

struggles to break out of the dikes which your folly and 
rebellion have built. Why will you not let me be kind 
to you ? Why will you not put yourselves where I can 
let loose upon you all the pent-up love and yearning of 
my heart ? " Such is the feeling which breaks out here 
and there over the whole surface of the Old Testament, 
as when it is said, " In His love and pity He redeemed 
them and bare and carried them all the days of old. 
Forty years long was I grieved with this generation. Oh, 
that there were such a heart in them that they would 
hear me and keep my commandments. How shall I give 
thee up, Ephraim ? " 

Man's rebellion and alienation from God introduces 
us to an economy of adjustment. In the natural, 
healthful relation between father and son we hear little 
or nothing about terms of agreement. The terms are 
all included in the fact of mutual love. When the 
relation is disturbed, then covenants and agreements 
and promises come to the front. It is as if God said, 
"You have put yourselves off the higher ground of 
sonship ; I will come down and meet you on the lower 
ground. I will agree and covenant to be kind to you." 
And so you will observe how this matter of stipulation 
with men on God's part keeps coming out in the Bible 
history of redemption. It is in the form of a promise 
to the first guilty pair that the seed of the woman shall 
bruise the serpent's head. It is a covenant with 
Abraham ratified by human symbols, as the burning 
lamp and smoking furnace pass between the pieces of 
the parted victim. It is a promise to Jacob in the 



12 THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 

vision at Bethel, and a covenant of Jacob with God, 
when, in his first waking moments, he sets up as a pillar 
the stone on which his head has rested, and pouring oil 
upon it, enters into solemn agreement with the Most 
High. Study the terms in which, again and again, God 
pledges Himself to bless and foster the people of Israel. 
Read what He says by the mouth of His prophet, 
Jeremiah : " Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that 
I will make a new covenant with the house of Judah : 
not according to the covenant that I made with their 
fathers ; but this shall be the covenant that I will make 
with the house of Israel : After those days, saith the 
Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write 
it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and they shall 
be my people. And they shall teach no more every 
man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 
Know the Lord : for they shall all know me, from the 
least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord : 
for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember 
their sin no more." 

And then pass on to that memorable night in the 
upper chamber at Jerusalem, and see the Son of God as 
He lifts the cup in His hands, so soon to be pierced in 
ratification of His pledge, and says, " Drink ye all of 
this, for this is my blood of the new covenant which is 
shed for you and for many for the remission of sins." 

Note, too, the phrase, " covenant of peace." Peace ! 
It is the word which defines and embodies the kindness 
of God in Jesus Christ. The agreement which God 
makes with man is, in the first place, that man shall be 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 



13 



at peace with Him : that alienation shall cease : that 
the man shall come back from his attitude of an enemy 
into his normal attitude as a son of God : that he shall 
be no more a stranger, but a fellow-citizen with God's 
own : no more a prodigal in a far country, but a son at 
home in his Father's house : no more working against 
God, but enlisted and working with Him in the interests 
of His eternal kingdom : having fellowship with the 
Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. 

Then, further, growing out of this right attitude of 
man toward his Father God, is God's agreement to give 
him peace in the sense of restfulness. " Come unto me," 
says Christ, " and I will give you rest." That is more than 
a promise, it is a covenant. There are two parties and 
two mutual obligations. The weary and the sin- 
burdened are to come to Christ — that is their part. 
Christ on His part stands pledged to give rest unto their 
souls : rest in the eternal part of their being ; rest at 
the centre of life which touches God and eternity. 

And those who have truly entered into this covenant, 
need no words of mine to prove to them that it is a 
covenant which carries with it the loving-kindness of 
God. Take it as related to sin. You have known what 
sin is. You have known its seductions and have felt its 
lash. You have known what it was to go seeking rest 
and finding none, and finally to go, bowed and burdened, 
covered with shame and anguish, to the feet of your 
crucified Lord, confessing your sin and pleading for 
mercy. And you can answer for it to-day that you met 
there nothing but kindness. Every other feeling on the 



14 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 



part of your justly-offended Lord was swallowed up in 
His joy at your return. You have found what was in 
the heart of Christ when He pictured the prodigal's 
return and the father's joy, and the tumult of delight 
which shook the whole household. Yes, poor, sinful, 
contrite soul, when you came to the cross, you were met, 
not with heaven's thunder of indignation, but with 
heaven's rapturous joy over one sinner that had re- 
pented. 

Since that time you have not been faultless. Your 
life as a disciple has been marked by numerous lapses. 
It has developed both infirmity and transgression. I 
ask you this morning if, in the face of this fact, God's 
kindness has been removed? Has it ever wavered? 
Have you not always found at His mercy-seat compas- 
sion for your weakness ; a helping hand in your struggle 
after reformation and purity ; pardon for your lapses ; 
a healing touch upon your bruises and scars ; a word of 
warning and of caution, but also a tender whisper — " Go 
into peace " ? 

Or trouble. You know something of life, and there- 
fore you know what trouble is. You have been anxious 
and care-worn ; sore beset, and worried, as with myriad 
sting9. And yet can you say that you have not been 
helped through the worst ; that you have not had 
strength descend upon you for the hardest push ; that, 
even when your gloomiest anticipations were more than 
realized, you have not had power given you to do and to 
bear ; that even in the straitest place there has not been 
opened for you a way out ? Has the kindness of God 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GOB'S KINDNESS. 15 

been removed from you in your loneliness? Has it ever 
failed to put another and a stronger prop in the place of 
the broken reed on which you had leaned ? And yet, 
perhaps, in the face of all this, you have sometimes suf- 
fered trouble to be eating out your heart when you 
might have cast all your care on God. Perhaps you 
have fretted and been anxious when you might have 
been at rest in the assurance of God's immutable kind- 
ness. If so, resolve that with God's help, you will 
gather up your faith, and with all your hearts believe 
that, though the mountains depart and the hills be re- 
moved, His loving-kindness shall not depart from you, 
neither shall the covenant of His peace be removed. 
Often we have sung together the old hymn, which bet- 
ter than any other I know, gathers up this train of 
thought : 

" Awake, my soul, to joyful lays, 
And sing the great Redeemer's praise ; 
He justly claims a song from me : 
His loving-kindness, oh, how free ! 

" He saw me ruined in the fall, 
Yet loved me, notwithstanding all ; 
He saved me from my lost estate : 
His loving-kindness, oh, how great ! 

" Though numerous hosts of mighty foes, 
Though earth and hell my way oppose, 
He safely leads my soul along : 
His loving-kindness, oh, how strong ! 

" When trouble, like a gloomy cloud, 
Has gathered thick and thundered loud, 



1 6 THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 

He near my soul has always stood : 
His loving-kindness, oh, how good ! " 



It shall not be removed. No, the covenant of God's 
peace with His people is an everlasting covenant. 
Neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able 
to separate them from the love of God which is in 
Christ Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant. His 
loving-kindness reaches into the future. The covenant 
is a covenant of promise. Hear how beautifully the 
prophet in the context puts this promise under the 
figure of a lovely palace which shall be the dwelling- 
place of God's own : " O, thou afflicted, tossed with 
tempest, and not comforted ; behold, I will lay thy 
stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with 
sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and 
thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant 
stones." 

So we look to the mountains, their foundations laid 
of old, those everlasting hills which lifted themselves in 
the beginning of time, with their vast bastions, and their 
steep battlements, their icy pinnacles, their lonely snow- 
fields, — those giant forms which seem to defy the touch 
of time — we look to them only to look away to some- 
thing more enduring, the loving-kindness of God. 
" They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure. Yea, all of 
them shall wax old as a garment. As a vesture shalt 
Thou roll them up and they shall be changed : but Thou 



THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. 



17 



art the same. Thy years shall have no end." And out 
of their clefts, from behind the ramparts of their power, 
comes a voice : " The mountains shall depart, and the 
hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from 
thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, 
saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee." 



II. 

THE SEED OF LIGHT. 

"Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for 
the upright in heart." — Psalm xcvii. n. 

LIGHT and gladness. It is natural to desire them, 
and God does not crucify nature. He only trains and 
corrects it. This text tells us that light and gladness 
are for the upright, and the next verse bids the right- 
eous rejoice. An eagle desires the air, and a fish the 
water. Is it strange ? A child of God is a child of light, 
begotten of Him who is light and in whom is no dark- 
ness at all. If he longs for the light, is that strange? 
The apostle John tells us that we lie if we say we have 
fellowship with Him and walk in darkness ; and the wise 
man says that the hope of the righteous shall be glad- 
ness. 

But what about the peculiar way in which this promise 
of light and gladness is put? Light and gladness are 
sown. A startling figure that, and a grand, one too. God 
as a sower, scattering seeds of light. The statement is : 
God gives light to His children as seed. What does that 
mean? 

If you will think for a moment, you will see that the 

truth is not out of harmony with much that you already 

know in your Bibles. You must have noticed how often 
(18) 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. I9 

our Lord uses the figure of seed, and the reason is not 
very far to find. The figure simply recognizes the great 
law of growth which everything in the universe, from a 
grass-blade to the spiritual kingdom of God on earth, 
obeys. Nothing comes into life full-grown. The tree 
and the grain grow up from seed. The man is a babe 
first. The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard-seed. 
It becomes a great tree, but not at a leap. So of the 
fruits of the spirit in men. Knowledge, faith, love, joy, 
grow through successive stages, like the blade, the ear, 
and the full corn. 

Are we then to expect that light and gladness will 
come full-grown into Christian experience, any more 
than that the sun, at his rising, will shine with noonday 
splendor? Are we not told that "the path of the just 
shineth more and more unto the perfect day"? There 
are, I know, childish views of Christian experience which 
find a sympathetic chord struck in the hypochondriac 
poet's verse — 

" Where is the blessedness I knew, when first I saw the Lord ? " 

There are those who assume that Christian gladness 
reaches its height in the first contact with Christ; not 
seeming to understand that joy, like all fruits of the 
spirit, obeys the law of growth, and that an initial 
Christian experience does not put its subject on a level 
with a matured one in respect of joy, any more than it 
does in respect of knowledge. There is a gladness be- 
longing to a ripened Christian which a new disciple can 



JO 



//// .•,/ / n 01 //<,///. 



ii< 1 1 ii< i appn < lat< noi fi 1 1. 1 he il rong man rcvi Li In 

t Ik Ii 'lil win. Ii Hk ml. ml < \ < . < .mimmI |,< .m. 

( rod, thcrefon llghl and gladm n to Hisi hildn n 

jusl as 1 l< (lo< s otln i 1 1 1 1 1 1 ; • . , m i iiiin.ill) , in I li< m i <l 

foi in , noi -ill .ii "in . , in floods, but wil ii i lai i ve 

Into uIik ii i he wan ii to wo\ I hii way ( As life mo 

toward I rod, il unfolds this s. « <l and l< I . mil and 

more lighl , unl 11 etei nil y di velops I he full hai vi si oi 
Ughl 

VVil Ii I In . nViiri ul sou inv '.< - (I arc naturally ai 

ftted twol houghti hiding and diffusion i and I hi i wo In 

G\ [tably ' "ii tOgl 1 1^ i . b< I auie, in I he n.il m.il |»KM i ■.■>, 

hiding ii w [1 h b \ li w to diffusion* Tin- pun < ■■. <>i 
grow i ii 1 1 dill i Ibul Ivc, not only In I hi final ■< atti i 
oi i hi seed, but mi i h.it , m i he nnf< -Mm" «.i i in- • .. < <i, 
lomething beautiful and promising Ii d< v< loped ai ev< »y 
rui ■ in i he blade and In I he i ai , no li • I han 

in I Ik- lull COl ii- 

II I In n li-hi ami : -. I . i « ! 1 1 ' ■■.-. arc to Ik: looked foi In 

( in [si i. m id- , ii i ■ Impoi i. nit t<> remcmbci i hai i hi y are 

growl li., and I hai , as su< li, th< y i ai i y wi1 h I hem a CCJ 

tain .HiK-iini oi < "in - . 1 1 1 1 1 • ul .mil di lay ( I •• i us i onsldi t 
•...in. 1 1 1 1 1 .i i.ii Ions "i i his, 

I rod hidi i •,• lighl and gladm is I tain I hin 

win. h, foi i he i Ime, give no hint oi whal 1 1 ■ Il hin, i i n 
as the rough ai orn gives no visible promise ol i he grand 
cm .unl leafage oi I he oak. And hi re b< \ er can ful to 
note thai when ( rod us I hi n n < d., 1 1. • . .|>< ♦ is ns 

t.> i.m.i. foi ..hi lighl in i h. in. None I he less, b< i ause 
the acorn Is hard and rough, musl you look i"i youi oalt 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 2 l 

in your acorn. You will not find it by turning away to 
something smoother and softer. One of the very first 
things to which God introduces us on our entrance into 
1 1 1 ^ kingdom is duty. God knows that in all duty there 
is light which faithful doing will bring out. Often, how- 
ever, He shows us very little or none of the light and 
promise, but only the dark furrows of duty in which the 
light is sown: and He says to us, "Your work lies up 
and down along those furrows, to keep them free from 
weeds, to drive away the birds, to keep the earth loose, 
and to watch and wait until the light shall appear." I 
know that I am talking to a great many men and women 
who have had and are having that very experience — that 
their life lies in contact with something which must be 
done, which they do not like to do, which has no hint of 
light or gladness in it. Only it is a duty, plain and clear. 
God puts this text into your hand and points to the fur- 
rows lying so darkly there, and says, " Your light is sown 
there. Believe it on my word. You will not find it 
by leaving these dark furrows for greener fields. If it 
spring up for you at all, it will spring up here. I have 
sown light for you here, and my seed always means har- 
vest." For often we are tempted to think that our light 
will come in evading such duty: that God will give us 
light by removing the hardness. It is not so. We must 
get through the hard shell. The light lies under it. We 
must watch and tend the hopeless-looking furrow. The 
light lies in it. 

I suppose that Abraham did not see much light when 
he was going up Moriah to offer Isaac. Certainly he did 



22 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 



not see it in the heart of that dreadful duty ; and yet he 
found it at the very altar, and in the very act of sacrifice : 
new and stronger light on God's faithfulness; light on 
the value and power and honor of faith ; light in the 
praise and approval of God ; light thrown backward from 
the Light of the world in the far-off future ; and so Je- 
sus himself tells us how gladness was sown for the up- 
right in heart. " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see 
my day, and he saw it and was glad." God's plough 
went straight through Moses' peaceful life of culture and 
power in Egypt, and drew a deep dark furrow round by 
Horeb to Pisgah. There was frequent hiding of the 
light along the lines of that weary journey to Canaan, 
but it broke out now and then. Moses saw it when he 
stood in the cleft of the rock on Sinai, where all God's 
goodness passed before him, and where his human eye 
could not bear the full light of God's self-revealing; and 
it must have flooded his soul as he stood on the height 
from which his spirit went up to God, and looked over 
to the sunny corn-lands and rich verdure of the inherit- 
ance promised to his race. What a dark day that was 
for Israel when the law was given on Sinai. What a day 
of terror as the mountain smoked like a furnace, and the 
Lord came down in fire and spake with a voice which 
froze their hearts with fear. What a law was that, with 
its stern "thou shalt and thou shalt not." And yet 
what treasures of light were hidden in that law. They 
began to find out ere long, that walking on those lines 
meant peace and victory and security. There arose one 
in Israel, in later days, who could compare that law to 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 23 

the going forth of the sun in the heavens, and could say, 
"The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; 
the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the 
eyes. The entrance of Thy words giveth light." And 
when Jesus, the Light of the world, came, and touched 
those old, rigid lines of law, came not to destroy but to 
fulfil, how they bloomed and eared into a very harvest 
of light which cheers and fosters our Christian homes 
and our Christian society to-day. 

The same truth appears in the providences of God. 
They are full of light, but it is sown light. It is a 
strange fact of nature how much beauty God stores 
away in underground caverns where the walls are gemmed 
and the great stalactites hang, only awaiting the torch 
to fill the darkness with points of light and glories of 
color. We understand well enough how God hides the 
diamond and the topaz in the dark and overlays them 
with hard and coarse crusts ; how He shuts up the crys- 
tal in the heart of the rough geode ; and we doubt not 
that human skill and labor can bring them forth from 
their wrappings and make them blaze in the coronets of 
kings. Why will we limit these facts to nature merely, 
to God's economy on its lower side, and not see that 
God carries up the same facts to a higher level, and ap- 
plies the same method in His spiritual economy, and 
conceals light and joy beneath the hard incrustations of 
sorrow and pain ? So it is an equally notable fact that 
God continually leads His children into dark places to 
seek for light. One of the hardest lessons we ever learn 
is to undertake that search cheerfully and believingly ; 



24 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 



for, as I have already said, we must not seek light some- 
where else than in the providence, thinking that, if we 
can only get the providence out of the way, the light 
will shine in. We learn after awhile that it is possible 
to see in the dark. When we are taken out of the full 
sunshine into some dark catacomb, all is perfect black- 
ness for awhile ; but the eye adapts itself to the new 
conditions after a time. It is somewhat thus when God 
takes us out of the glare of worldly prosperity and joy;, 
and shuts us up within the confines of a dark providence. 
We come by and by to see in the dark. The spiritual pu- 
pil adapts itself to the new state of things, and we see that 
the dark is peopled, and not with unkind faces. Human 
nature sees no light in a grave. Those first disciples of 
Christ saw none as they entered the door of Joseph's 
tomb and laid down the body of their beloved Master 
and friend. Peter and John and Mary had another 
story to tell on the third morning after. One of them at 
least had seen angels of light there. To-day that tomb 
is the central point of light for the world. We have 
learned that the Light of the world was sown, even as a 
corn of wheat, that it might bring forth much fruit. 
That fact goes with every train of Christian mourners to 
the grave's mouth, infusing the assurance that what is 
sown in dishonor shall be raised in glory. Not only so. 
The grave not unfrequently hides light for us — precious 
lessons which come out in the experience and the dis- 
cipline of later years. All of you remember the story 
so graphically told by the Scottish poet, of the wizard 
buried in the abbey aisles with a lamp upon his breast ; 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 



25 



and how, when the stone was removed after many years, 
the light from that lamp blazed up and lighted the tomb 
and the magic volume in the dead hand. So it is that 
sometimes we go back after many days to the grave 
where we buried as we thought all the gladness and 
light of our lives, to find in the hand of the dead a lamp 
and a lesson-book. A hard providence of God is a seed 
with a rough and prickly husk, but it is a seed of light, 
sown by Him who commanded the light to shine out of 
darkness, and who will shine in His people's hearts to 
give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ. 

The truth applies equally to the process of winning 
Christian knowledge and faith. We are like children at 
school. Study and thought and books are full of light 
to you now ; but when you were a child, light came to 
you under cover of duty, by way of rules and formulas; 
through labor when you saw more gladness in sport ; 
through strict discipline, when you thought that com- 
plete freedom would be perfect gladness. Would it be 
strange if God should deal with you in similar wise in 
acquiring the knowledge of His truth and will? The 
idea that all learning must be made pleasant, bids fair to 
be one of the heresies of modern education. At any 
rate that is not God's theory of education. He is not a 
harsh master, far from it ; but He does not make Chris- 
tian training easy. He introduces His pupils to the rest 
and the restfulness of faith, but none the less He makes 
them work out their salvation. He will not let us win the 
fruits of experience too easily nor be carried comfortably 



26 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 



into the harvest -fields of light simply to enjoy what 
others have sown. A good many of the sparks which 
lighten and warm us we have to strike out. A good deal 
of our gladness we have to wait for along the furrows of 
duty and sacrifice. A good many of the problems of 
faith which, once solved, bring us deep peace, and yield 
us most effective implements in Christian work and war- 
fare, have to be worked out till the unknown quantity is 
found. There are some men to whom conviction, or at 
least satisfaction, seems to come by some shorter pro- 
cess : to whom doubt never seems to be a serious obsta- 
cle : but there are others whose religious history, for a 
long way at least, appears to be a continuous mining 
and tunnelling; who get their light mostly through 
openings which they blast out for themselves through 
the heart of obstinate doubts. I have little fear for a 
man who sets himself honestly to face and penetrate 
such obstacles. He will work his way to light, though 
he seem a heretic for the time being. There are things 
which a true man would like to believe, and which it is > 
a sorrow for him not to be convinced of, but he is a 
happier man after all, and gets more light on his way 
than the one who is afraid of his doubts, and slips past 
them only to be haunted by the perpetual dread that 
they are lurking somewhere in the rear. The man who 
marches squarely up to a great doubt and joins battle 
with it, at least knows the size and weight of his adver- 
sary. The thing which he confronts is at least no phan- 
tom magnified by his uncertainties or his fears. He strikes 
out light enough in the conflict to take his antagonist's 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 



27 



measure and that is something. No man rights confi- 
dently with shadows. A modern preacher has found a 
beautiful illustration of the light which thus comes out 
of the faithful struggle with doubt, in the knowledge of 
the chemistry of the sun and stars, which is derived, not 
from the bright prismatic beams of light streaming from 
those bodies, but from the blank, black spaces which tell 
of rays arrested in their path and prevented from bear- 
ing their message to us by particular metallic vapors. 
The man who wins the light of solid conviction and in- 
telligent faith out of darkness, wins purer light. He 
leaves the path behind him clear and with light on every 
step by which he has come. His faith, tunnelling down 
as well as out, gets down to the bed-rock. You remem- 
ber the noble lines in which England's laureate describes 
such an one — 

* He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 

He would not make his judgment blind, 

He faced the spectres of the mind 
And laid them : thus he came at length 

To find a stronger faith his own ; 
And power was with him in the night 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 

And dwells not in the light alone, 
But in the darkness and the cloud." 

But let us look at the other thought — that of diffusion 
or distribution. Concealment or reserve in God's econ- 
omy is with a view to revelation. Christ said, " There 
is nothing hidden but in order that it should be re- 
vealed," and though, as we have seen, God's revelations 
unfold gradually, that very fact results in the distribu- 



28 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 



tion of His revelations along the whole line of an indi- 
vidual life or of a nation's history. That is one aspect 
of the truth. A grain of wheat is wheat, not only in the 
full corn, but in the blade and the ear likewise, and in 
the growth of the seeds of light they unfold into light 
all along the way of the upright. Though something is 
hidden, though all godly living includes patient waiting, 
yet God does not condemn His children to walk in dark- 
ness all their days, and only then let in upon them the 
light of heaven in one overwhelming flood. The perfect 
day is at the end, it is true, but still the path of the just 
shineth more and more. The word is a lamp unto the 
feet in their daily walk. And therefore the hard duties 
and the hard providences, while they hide light, yet do 
not keep in all the light. We may be sure of one thing, 
that, whatever may be kept hidden, God keeps back no 
light which His child needs for his walk in the way of 
righteousness. Light is struck out in the doing of the 
hard duty and in the patient and trustful meeting of the 
dark providence. There is self-denial, for instance. No * 
doubt it will be a good while before it will cease to be 
hard, or will bring its full reward : but meanwhile the 
practice of it is not without its gladness and light. If a 
great rock is between you and the orb of the moon, and 
you succeed in pushing the rock ever so little to one 
side, you let in a little light, and the farther away you 
push it, the more light enters. Self is the great bulk 
between us and God. If we push even a little of self to 
one side, a little of the light of heaven comes straight to 
our hearts and inspires us to push harder and to get more 



THE S1!Z OF LIGHT. zz 

of self out of the way. And when self is so far crowded 
out that Christ, in the person of one of His sick or poor 
or orphaned ones, can step into the place, the light whi 
is reflected from that rested and comforted soul is very 
bright and pure. 

Take the grace of Hope. .. Hope has a hard fight for 
life in some natures ; and the climb to even a low slope 
of hopefulness is a i: stressing one. Yet when one of 
God s itsponding children does manfully grapple with 
his despondency and resolutely work his way upward, 
saying, u Why art thou cast down, O my soul ? K : : - 
thou in God. I shall yet praise Him " — light breaks 
along the line of that struggle. From the first landing- 
place he gets a glimpse of it; and that glimpse ner ves 
him for the climb to the point above, where the light is 
brighter and the view wider. The doing of duty of any 
kind, simply for Christ's sake and because it is duty, un- 
folds the seed of light. The light of conscience, for in- 

q ce, burns clearer. That is a ^reat deal. The: - . 
God keeps hidden His purpose in assigning this duty, 
the man must work on by faith and not by sight: 
and the light of faith becomes brighter and steadi 
That too is a great deal. There is always light enough 
for him to see Jesus s.::d to work his way toward Him 
Then too even- duty has in it some satisfaction and 
pleasure which one does not discover until he has 
grasped the duty firmly, and turned it over and over 
and shaken it well. Some of the things which interest you 
most to-day are things which you undertook most reluc- 
tantly, but they have b sgun to sparkle under the friction 



30 THE SEED OF LIGHT. 

of constant and faithful handling. When you first went 
into a hospital, unfamiliar with suffering and death, 
there was no light in the duty. You dreaded it. You 
went simply because you ought to go. The light has 
been coming ever since. You have learned to love 
the work of ministry. Christ's own light has burned 
more brightly in your own heart, and clearer and fuller 
knowledge of the depth and meaning of His promises 
has been coming to you as you have tried to lay those 
promises on sore hearts. 

Then too, light, like seed in contact with the dark fur- 
row, multiplies itself by its contact with hard experi- 
ence ; for after all, it takes hard things like flint and steel 
to strike out light. Some of you have stood on a rocky 
platform among the high Alps and watched the coming 
of dawn. You saw the saffron light deepen behind some 
monster peak, and soon the first sunbeam appeared 
above the crest ; and as it darted forth, it struck and 
was flashed back from a great snow-field which blushed 
and kindled under its touch. Another beam shot over 
to a cluster of ice-needles, and each one of them became 
a point of dazzling light. Then a long ray leaped over 
to that peak, far up in the calm ether, awful in the loneli- 
ness of its virgin snow, and the great cone glistened and 
sparkled over its whole surface, and threw back the light 
to another peak, and flash answered flash, and the threads 
of light crossed and twined until the heaving sea of hills 
was bathed in glory. So every Christlike effort, every 
Christian grace resolutely carried into practice, not only 
emits light, but multiplies the light at every point where 



THE SEED OF LIGHT. 3I 

it touches. Faith nerves itself for a timid venture and 
throws out its one feeble ray toward a hard task or a hard 
trial or a hard problem ; and behold the thing brightens, 
and in its own brightening throws light on some other 
duty or trial, on some great snow-field of lonely sacrifice 
and patience. Success in the first venture of faith has 
robbed the larger venture of some of its darkness, and 
thus the pilgrim of faith walks in ever growing light. 
In short, the more faithfully and persistently one ad- 
dresses himself to doing God's will, the more points his 
experience affords from which the goodness and love and 
faithfulness and power of God are reflected. And these 
points enlighten each other. One part of Christian ex- 
perience illuminates another part. Each experience 
takes up the light furnished by the smallest, and reflects 
and helps to distribute it over the whole area. 

Light is sown for the righteous and gladness for the 
upright in heart. Let us not lose faith in the fact of 
Christian gladness because it comes to us so often in 
the seed form. Let us not believe that God would 
have us walk in darkness because He gives us the seeds 
of light rather than the perfect day at once. Oh, if 
there be one of you whose way lies under heavy shadow, 
remember that the Light himself, that great Light 
which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world, 
the Father of lights who varies not, and throws no 
shadow by fickle changing — remember that He is with 
you alway even unto the end of the world. Move on 
in the firm faith that believing, patient, unswerving 
fidelity must and will unfold those buried seeds of light 



32 THE SEED OF LIGHT. 

into their radiant harvest. God will not make every- 
thing plain to you in this life, though much which is 
hidden at first will come into light as you get deeper in- 
to the years ; but do not forget that the perfect unfold- 
ing is not for time. Anything which is enfolded in one 
of God's seeds, is a grand growth. Earth is not large 
enough for its fruitage. It needs the ampler spaces of 
heaven to put forth its leafage in full luxuriance. Your 
path may shine more and more, but the perfect day will 
dawn first after you shall have crossed the ridge which 
shuts in this little heritage of time. Then first you shall 

" See the King's full glory break, 

Nor from the blissful vision shrink. 

In fearless love and hope uncloyed 
Forever on that ocean bright 

Empowered to gaze, and, undestroyed, 
Deeper and deeper plunge in light." 

Righteousness is light and gladness though its way lie 
through sorrow and sacrifice : and you who are pursuing 
that road in faith and hope may take this for your comfort 
that you are going forward to inevitable gladness. God 
has already wrought out great goodness before your 
eyes ; but that is nothing to the goodness which He has 
laid up for them that fear Him. If there is assurance of 
harvest in the buried seed, there is even firmer assurance 
in the temporary hiding of God's light. If the promise 
of nature is sure, the promise of faith is no less sure : 
for " eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath en- 
tered into the heart of man the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love Him." 



III. 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS FOR THE 
PRESENT LIFE. 

"But godliness is profitable for all things, having 
promise of the life which now is, and of that 
which is to come." — i Timothy iv. 8. 

I HAVE many times spoken to you of the future life 
and of its promise. I have often urged upon you the 
necessity of living with the future distinctly in view, and 
of shaping this life with reference to the transcendent 
claims of eternity. I have presented to you heaven as 
the solution of the problems of time, the reward of faith- 
ful sen-ice, the rest from the weariness of earth. I have 
not a word of all this to take back. I have nothing to 
say which might chill your hopes of heaven, which might 
impair your sense of the sweetness of its rest, or which 
might weaken in the least the force of the stimulus and 
direction which it gives to your earthly work. 

It is profoundly true that godliness has promise of the 
life which is to come. But I wish to-dav to fix vour 
thoughts upon the other member of the text — the prom- 
ise of the life which now is. Because, while it is im- 
possible to exaggerate the importance of our relations 
to the future life, experience shows that it is possible to 

contemplate the future to the neglect of the present. 
2* (33) 



34 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 



The truth is that the two are parts of one life, and that 
any view of life which leaves out either, is one-sided and 
hurtful. 

Not long since a friend was telling me of a sermon 
preached in a church in another city, a church which 
does not bear the name of " orthodox." The preacher 
spoke in bitter terms of the evil effect of church teach- 
ing about the future life upon great masses of men ; 
how they had been encouraged to patient endurance of 
hard things in this life — things which were the results of 
men's cruelty and selfishness, — and had been kept under 
and quiet by the promise that the future would make 
everything right. From what I could gather from my 
friend's story, I inferred that the preacher pushed his 
discussion to extremes to which, probably, none of us 
would be willing to follow him. And yet I could not 
help feeling that he had at least gotten hold of one end 
of a very important truth : and that possibly the church, 
in her emphasis upon the future life, has in some meas- 
ure overlooked the just claims of the present life, and 
the richness of the promise of godliness to the life which 
now is. 

I take then this simple statement of the text, not 
overlooking the companion statement, nor attempting 
to deny its force : Godliness has promise of the life 
which now is. I think we all have a pretty distinct con- 
ception of what the apostle means by godliness : life un- 
der God's direct personal guidance; inspired by love to 
God ; led in obedience to God, and in personal com- 
munion with God. I take it then further, that the apos- 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 35 

tie means to say that to such a life God promises good 
and profitable things, not only in heaven, but here upon 
earth. That godliness has its possibilities of joy, of use- 
fulness, of attainment, of victory, of knowledge, of so- 
cial good, of spiritual stature, in this world as well as in 
the heavenly world. This is substantially what I under- 
stand by Paul's words. 

And it seems to me that this must be true in the na- 
ture of the case. For if godliness consists in being loyal- 
ly under God's administration, then it follows, of course, 
that a godly man is under that administration no less on 
earth than in heaven. Do we not make, practically, too 
wide a separation in our thought between earth and 
heaven ? I know there is a difference, a wide difference, 
both as to conditions and circumstances ; but the cen- 
tral fact of both lives is the same. They are absolutely 
alike in that, in both, God is the supreme and controlling 
fact. We conceive of the kingdom of God as two worlds, 
separated by a wide chasm. The proper conception is 
rather that of one vast territory, of lowland and high- 
land if you please. For the present we are moving on 
the lowlands, the highlands no doubt are misty ; but the 
highlands are only lifts in the same surface. You do not 
pass into another world when you leave the plains of the 
West and ascend the Rocky Mountains. The railroad 
track is continuous from the plain to the summit. So 
heaven is higher than earth, — purer, brighter, happier, 
but earth and heaven alike are the kingdom of God ; 
earth is merely a lower level of that kingdom. And 
therefore it should follow that, once within the kingdom 



36 THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 

of God, one should find the laws and the promises of 
that kingdom operating at the one level no less than at 
the other. 

A sovereign whose kingdom embraces mountain- 
regions and valleys, does not impose one law on the 
mountaineers and another on the men of the plains. 
The administration is one, and the loyal subject at the 
foot of the hills shares its privileges with the moun- 
taineer. 

Conditions, I repeat, are different. Some things are 
possible to the dweller among the high peaks which are 
not possible to the dweller in the valley ; but the king is 
the same, the law is the same ; and whatever privileges 
of that administration are possible to the dweller in any 
section of it, are freely his. The great central sovereignty 
which makes all sections one kingdom, affects all the 
sections. The thought, therefore, which we are to keep 
prominently in view is, that on earth as in heaven we are in 
the kingdom of God, and in virtue of that fact are entitled 
to the privileges of that kingdom. Godliness has promise, 
must have promise for that side of the kingdom in which 
we are now no less than for that side to which we are go- 
ing. Enoch walked with God : was he any less with God 
when he walked out of the gate into a part of the king- 
dom beyond human sight ? " God took him," we are told. 
And as we read what Scripture tells us about the heaven- 
ly world, it is very clear that the great principles and 
facts which constitute the order and the enjoyment of 
heaven are precisely those which are commended to us 
as the great motors and regulators of our life here. 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 



37 



Love, trust, obedience, ministry, communion, worship, — 
they are primary facts in heaven as on earth. The law 
of your Christian life here is obedience to God. When 
you shall have reached heaven you will surely be under 
no other law. " His servants shall serve Him." The 
motive and mainspring of your Christian life here is 
love. There can be no other or higher motive there. 
" Love never faileth." The life which you live in the 
flesh you live by faith. You will not depend on God 
any less in heaven than you do here. Your joy here is 
in God. You surely do not expect to find any higher 
or purer source of joy in heaven. Your joy will be 
greater, to be sure, but it will still be in God. 

I wonder, further, if we all realize how much the Bible 
has to say about this life as compared with the next. 
Cull out all its maxims and precepts bearing upon the 
principles and conduct of this life, and all the histories 
and incidents which go to illustrate these, and collect 
them into one volume, and then gather into another 
all that is said about the future life, — the one volume 
will be very thick and the other very thin. As a his- 
tory, with a moral and spiritual purpose, the Bible must 
deal mainly with this life. A history of the angels be- 
fore the creation of the world would be little better than 
a curiosity. It could be of no practical use to us. As 
a book of precepts and instructions, if it be not for 
this life, what is it for? Whatever the Bible may be, 
it is pre-eminently something to live by here. The 
more the significance that attaches to the future life, 
the stronger is the reason for giving us a manual for 



38 THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 

this life. If we are to do anything or to become any- 
thing as a preparation for the next world, we must do 
and become here. It is a very significant fact that a 
large section of the history covered by the Bible is de- 
veloped almost entirely without the influence of hopes 
and promises attaching to the future life. There were 
generations of godly people who had to live without any 
strong light on the future, and practically without the 
influence of the powerful motives engendered by the 
Christian revelations of immortality. I say this, remem- 
bering the words of the writer to the Hebrews about 
those who desire a heavenly country, and who look for 
the city which hath the foundations ; and remembering, 
moreover, that it is about Old Testament men that he is 
speaking. No doubt there were men who caught glimpses 
of the better thing beyond. No doubt there were special 
revelations to individuals ; though even in these cases I 
cannot discover much that is definite. I know that Job 
had a hope and even an assurance that a deliverer would 
come to him, sitting and waiting in the shadow of Sheol. 
But that the assurance of a future life entered as a mo- 
tive into the earlier religious development of the Hebrew 
nation at large, cannot be shown. Worldly prosperity 
as the sign of God's approval is the reward held out to 
virtue in the Old Testament. Job accepted his wealth 
and worldly happiness as such a token ; and when these 
were snatched away, he was confounded ; and his friends 
came to him and insisted that he must have sinned 
against God to have incurred such a visitation. 

The Hebrew, in short, was thrown in simple faith and 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 39 

in ignorance upon the God of his earthly life as the 
guarantee of his future. Meanwhile, the thing which 
was to be written upon his door-posts, lodged in his heart, 
bound about his neck and taught diligently to his chil- 
dren, was that God must be obeyed and worshipped 
here. To such loyalty God attached large promise of 
the life which now is. And that Old Testament econ- 
omy did not make contemptible saints either. Enoch 
walked with God ; so did Noah, who was a just man and 
perfect in his generation. Moses endured as seeing Him 
who is invisible. The moral influence of these men does 
not pass away with their age, but goes over into the new 
and better dispensation. In that dispensation they still 
appear, not as relics or antiques or fossils, but as types 
and models. Any one can satisfy himself of that by 
reading the eleventh of Hebrews. 

Christ brought life and immortality to light ; but did 
you ever think of the significance of that combination — 
life and immortality? If the Old Testament saints man- 
aged to live well and heroically without a clear revelation 
of immortality, does it follow that they had learned the 
whole meaning of life or that life has no moral and spirit- 
ual possibilities which they did not bring out of it ? When 
Christ brought immortality to light, He threw life also 
into a new light by the revelation of immortality. Life 
was made a new thing in the light of immortality. They 
without us were not to be made perfect. God provided 
a better thing for us. So far as heaven is concerned 
they are there, no doubt. Mortal eyes once saw Moses 
and Elijah in heavenly glory ; and whether the Chris- 



40 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 



tian saint will find himself on a higher level in heaven 
than the patriarchs, is a profitless question and one 
which need not detain us; but the thrust of the New 
Testament teaching on this point is that you and I are 
to be, with the light and help of the revelation of im- 
mortality, better men and women, of a higher spiritual 
type, and of a higher grade of efficiency than the patri- 
archs were. The truth of immortality not only reveals 
the future life : it lifts this life : it is intended to enlarge 
the mould of manhood. The head of the line which 
stretches back from this latest Christian century, away 
down through the ranks of old kings, prophets, and pa- 
triarchs, ought to be made up with characters of a far 
grander type than they. . 

So, then, Christ brings life to light in bringing immor- 
tality to light. Instead of turning away our thought 
from earth to heaven, He makes earth brighter and 
earthly life more significant with the light of heaven. 
The New Testament is often practically misread on this 
point. Some people seem to reason as if God had given 
up this world as a hopeless case : as if He recognized 
that nothing or not much could be done with man here ; 
and therefore His plan of redemption contemplated 
getting men through this world with as little damage as 
possible under the circumstances, in order to introduce 
them to a new and more hopeful order of things in 
heaven. It seems a strange kind of doctrine to me. 
For, in the first place, I confront the stupendous fact 
that God put Himself visibly and tangibly into this 
world in the person of Christ. I find Christ putting His 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 



41 



wisdom and sympathy and practical helpfulness along- 
side of every phase of this life of ours — buying and sell- 
ing, eating and drinking, social intercourse, sorrow and 
pain and sickness, deformity and maiming — with a dis- 
tinct and avowed purpose of setting a divine mark on 
each of them. To do this, evidently seemed to God a 
thing worth the life and death of Jesus. I read that 
God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, 
making this world and this society godlike. I hear 
Christ saying, " I am come that they might have life, 
and that they might have it more abundantly." From 
the pains which He took with this life I cannot think 
that He meant the abundance to come only in heaven. I 
know the comparisons between earth and heaven with 
which the New Testament abounds, and I know that 
the heavenly life is better and richer than this : but I 
notice that when Christ says, " In this world ye shall 
have tribulation," He does not offset it with, " In the 
next world yz shall have peace." It is " in me ye shall 
have peace," and " I am with you always even unto the 
end of the world." I hear Him say, " Come unto me, ye 
weary and heavy-laden ones, and I will give you rest "; 
but when they come, He does not take them out from 
under burdens. He puts a burden upon them, and says 
" the rest is under that burden." I hear Paul saying, " I 
desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better." 
I do not wonder he thought so ; but he says also, " for 
me to live is Christ." Looking forward to the crown of 
righteousness laid up for him, he also looks backward 
over his career, and says the fight was a good one, and 



42 THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 

he has fought it. There was something to be gotten out 
of this life and held, and he has won and kept it. I hear 
him talking about growing up into a perfect man, to the 
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ ; and he 
does not mean in heaven either. He is writing to those 
Ephesians who lived under the shadow of Diana's temple, 
where it was not easy to be a perfect man. I hear John 
saying, " The world is passing away "; but I read also, 
" This is the victory that overcometh the world." 

In short, godliness, if it has any meaning or promise 
for the life to come, must, for the same reason, have a 
significance and a promise for the life which now is ; for, 
as we have seen, the two are parts of one thing. Wher- 
ever God reigns, there is godliness. Wherever godliness 
goes, it carries its promise with it. God and godliness 
are facts of earth as well as of heaven, and the promise 
of godliness is therefore a fact of both alike. Godliness 
must touch and transform and lift and mould any sphere 
or form of life in which the godly man lives, whether it 
be on this side of death or on the other. We are con- 
stantly talking about eternal life as if it were a future 
thing. Do we forget that " he that believeth on the Son 
hath everlasting life " ? It is not " shall have." He hath 
it. Death, we say, separates one world from the other. 
Is that true for Christians? The Hudson River separates 
Dutchess and Putnam Counties from Ulster and Orange, 
and Westchester from Rockland, and Rensselaer from 
Albany ; but are we any less citizens of New York in 
Dutchess than in Orange ? The river flows through the 
State. It does not divide it from another State. So 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 



43 



the kingdom of God is on both sides of death. That 
river will be dried up one of these days, but meanwhile 
it flows through God's domain. Earth is on one side, 
heaven on the other, but earth and heaven are only two 
states of one kingdom. Earth and heaven together 
make up the kingdom of God. That our heritage 
stretches farther than we can see, does not disinherit 
us. A kingdom of which we could see the whole would 
be a very contemptible kingdom, and you and I are in 
the kingdom of God, which is a kingdom of infinite 
reaches, where we can expect to see only the smallest 
part of our territory. I do not like to hear that passage 
in Isaiah. about seeing the King in His beauty in a land 
which is very far off, interpreted to mean heaven. It 
does not mean heaven. Heaven is not very far off ; and 
as for the King, we have His own word for it that He 
is with us alway, and something of His beauty too, if 
we may believe the Psalmist, who desires to dwell in the 
house of the Lord all the days of his life, to behold the 
beauty of the Lord. If we are going to make that pas- 
sage of Isaiah a figure of heaven, let us read it as Isaiah 
wrote it. " Thine eyes shall see a land of distances — a far 
stretching land." Then we may read into the verse, if we 
please, the truth that the kingdom of heaven is larger 
than we think, and stretches not only far away, but close 
down to what we call the border line. Christ is here in 
the world. The powers of the world to come are at work 
here. It seems to me that we do not sufficiently realize 
that Christ came on purpose to bring heaven and earth 
together, in fact and in men's minds — heaven and earth 



44 THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 

— two things which belong together, but which popular 
thought had separated. 

How can one study Christ's parables, and not perceive 
that underlying their immediate application, is the great 
truth that heavenly laws are in operation here, and that 
heavenly facts have their answering facts on earth ? And 
Christ, I repeat, is here. His touch is on society. We 
may be distinctly conscious, if we will not blunt our 
senses, of the forces of the spiritual world crowding in 
from every side, and pressing against the lines of our 
social economy, as the great ocean presses around the 
sides of the ship. " The things that are not seen are 
eternal." So they are : but does it follow that the 
eternal things, because they are unseen, have no bearing 
here and now? "The things which are seen are tempo- 
ral," transitory. So they are : but does that exclude God 
from them ? If we will but open our eyes to the most 
familiar facts of nature we shall read the denial of that. 
We see and confess the work of God in hundreds of 
things which are transitory and ephemeral. The blossom 
which to-day is starting into life only to be borne down 
by the wind in a few weeks — God makes it, God paints 
it, God brings it forth every year. The beautiful snow- 
crystal which melts in an hour, the insect which plays 
for an hour in the light of the setting sun, are God's 
work. Is God any the less at work in the interest of 
moral order and spiritual beauty in the generations of men 
which are passing away as the fathers did before them ? 
Eternity! The metaphysicians say that eternity abol- 
ishes time ; but we can realize eternity only as the ex- 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 



45 



tension of time ; and they who are in Christ, and are 
therefore immortal, are in eternity now. He that doeth 
the will of God abideth forever. Our mistake is in re- 
garding eternity as all future. 

Now these are not speculations nor fancies. They 
are facts, every one of which can be sustained by the 
Bible, and facts which have an important practical bear- 
" ing. And our failure to grasp these facts leads us into 
mistakes. It tends to keep us farther away from Christ 
and from heaven than there is any need of our being. 
The failure to see that Christ wants to be thoroughly in- 
tertwined with human life, that there is such a thing as 
life in Christ and Christ's life in us, has fostered, for ex- 
ample, the idea of a sort of external, mechanical, legal, 
and formal relation to Christ in the place of oneness with 
Christ. Unconsciously the matter has presented itself 
to many in this shape : That by an act of Christ their 
legal relation to the divine majesty is changed ; and that 
the great central fact in Christian life is the assurance 
that the benefit of this change is assured to them. There 
is truth in this. The atoning act of Christ does adjust 
the legal relations of men to God ; but there are those 
who seem to stop with this ; and the practical conse- 
quence has been a class of Christians who, being satis- 
fied that they are converted and justified, have not car- 
ried out the fact to its legitimate consequences, have 
lived mainly on the assurance that they are legally 
certified as children of God, and have not reproduced 
Christ's life and spirit in themselves. Such a conception 
does not make saints any more than acquittal makes an 



46 THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 

indicted man virtuous and a good citizen. Reconcilia- 
tion to God is more than the adjustment of past differ- 
ences. It is bringing the whole man into oneness with 
God. The essence of Christ's atoning work lies in mak- 
ing man at one with God, not only legally and formally, - 
but actually ; in his will, his purposes, his desires, his 
deeds, his spirit and temper— his whole manhood, in 
short. An atonement which leaves out character is 
worthless. Having peace with God I do not under- 
stand to mean merely making terms with God, and hav- 
ing one's debt settled, and then, on the strength of that 
adjustment, being admitted to heaven. I understand it 
to mean what Paul says of the union of Jew and Gentile 
in Christ : " for to make in Himself of twain one new 
man, so making peace." 

The sum of Christian experience is not Christ outside 
of us negotiating terms with God, but Christ in us and 
we in Christ. And therefore the promise of godliness is 
a promise to make over our manhood into the mould of 
Christ's, here and before we die. It is not enough that 
we be simply declared acquitted and justified for Christ's 
sake. We must be Christlike. That is the Gospel 
ideal, expressed in such phrases as " putting on Christ," 
" putting on the new man," " a new creature or creation 
in Christ Jesus," " a life by the faith of the Son of God," 
" to live is Christ," and many similar ones. Inbred sin ! 
I know it. Temptation ! I know it. Natural weakness ! 
I know it. The push and stress of circumstance ! Yes, 
but is all the push from this side ? Does not God, by 
the helpfulness of Christ and the mighty influences of 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 



47 



the Spirit and the taste of the power of the world to 
come, bring a divine thrust to bear from the other side ? 
Are we to assume that the push from the side of Satan's 
kingdom is the stronger of the two — so strong indeed 
that we must be pushed out of this world and into 
heaven in order to make Christian manhood? I know 
how Paul looked at that matter when he saw and felt 
the clutch of evil principalities and powers, and the rush 
of life, pulling away from Christ. " I am persuaded that 
neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to 
separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus 
our Lord." If the Gospel is not intended to make us 
Christlike here, if it has not large promise of fruit in 
Christian character and achievement for this life, then 
I know not the meaning of Christ's footprints on every 
path where there is the mark of a human foot, and of 
that cross on one of the hills of earth. 

So I urge that this promise of godliness be taken 
more distinctly and squarely and believingly into the 
life on earth, to make Christian lives richer and 
purer, and Christian action more effective in this pres- 
ent time. 

It seems to me there is too strong a tendency to make 
escape rather than victory the key-note of life. To as- 
sume that the sin and sorrow of this world are so enor- 
mous and overpowering, that the best and only thing we 
can do is to get through all with as little harm as possi- 
ble, and to get out into something better beyond. And 



48 THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 

yet I read that evil is to be overcome with good. I 
read, " This is the victory that overcometh the world, 
even your faith." I look over to where the mist has 
lifted a little on the other side of the river, and the out- 
line of triumphal palms shimmers through the haze, and 
One stands there saying, " I will give this glory and this 
reward to him that overcometh." 

We pray, " Thy kingdom come." What do we mean 
by it ? How much do we mean by it ? Every day we 
are putting up that petition ; are we putting beside it in 
our thought a conviction of the impossibility of our 
prayer being answered here ? When we pray it with a 
personal reference — Thy kingdom come to us — is it with 
a feeling that the rule of God over us must needs be 
partial while we stay here on earth, and that the promise 
of the kingdom is to be realized by us only in faint hopes 
and feeble faith and short spiritual outlooks and partial 
peace ? When we pray it as a church, having in our eye 
the colossal misery and confusion and wickedness of this 
world, do we pray with a sort of hopeless feeling that 
the kingdom of Satan is after all the stronger ? If that 
be so, depend upon it that feeling will tie our hands, 
will contract our enterprise, will cramp and belittle our 
church life, will make our movements halting and aim- 
less. Godliness has promise of the life which now is. 
The kingdoms of this world are promised to Christ. Sin 
is mighty, but Christ is mightier. God did not make 
this world to lose it. He did not make humanity to 
have it wrested from Him by Satan. He did not make 
you and me to be dwarfs in holiness and weaklings in 



THE PROMISE OF GODLINESS. 49 

holy effort. May He give us a larger conception of 
His promise and a firmer faith in it ; and help us, by 
grasping and appropriating the promise of this life, to 
begin even here to realize the promise of the life which 
is to come. 



IV. 

FROM BEYOND JORDAN* 

" O my God, my soul is cast down within me : there- 
fore will I remember Thee from the land of Jor- 
dan and of the Hennonites, from the hill Mi- 
zar"—Y<$>MM xlii. 6. 

As one stands upon the walls of the old city of Gra- 
nada and looks across the wide plain out of which the 
citadel rises, his view is bounded by a range of barren 
mountains. On one of their summits the expelled 
Moors turned to take their last look at the vast plain, 
studded with gardens and threaded by streams, and at 
the lordly palace on its commanding height, which had 
been so long the stronghold of their power in Spain and 
the scene of their prodigal luxury. To them their de- 
parture was banishment from Paradise ; and the bitter- 
ness of their sorrow has been preserved in the tradition 
which has attached to that mountain-ridge from which 
they looked their last on Granada, the name of " The last 
sigh of the Moor." 

A striking parallel with this is found in the setting of 
this forty-second Psalm. Under what circumstances it 
was composed we do not know. Some have ascribed it 
to David when he fled from Absalom, and, having 
crossed the Jordan fords, took refuge at Mahanaim : 



* For the new year. 
(5o) 



FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 5l 

others to a priest of the temple carried away by the 
Chaldseans after the capture of Jerusalem. However 
this may be, the Psalm is the utterance of a man look- 
ing back out of present sorrow over a happy past. The 
scene is laid among the mountains on the east of the 
Jordan. From these the spectator had unfolded to him 
a magnificent view of the Land of Promise. Lebanon, 
the Sea of Galilee, the plain of Esdraelon, Carmel and 
the Mediterranean, the whole range of the mountains of 
Judah and Ephraim, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, could be 
seen from different stand-points. From these heights 
many an eye took its last look through falling tears at 
the familiar scenes of home and worship. David in his 
flight from Absalom, the captive Jews on their way to 
Babylon, had paused here to gaze upon the land of their 
love and pride. 

The words of the text are indeed those of a man 
whose soul is bowed down, but their lesson does not en- 
courage despondency, but on the contrary, hopefulness 
and peace. Let us try and get at the heart of that les- 
son to-day, as we mount the ridge which divides the past 
year from its successor. The lesson lies in one sentence: 
" I will remember Thee." 

It is needless to comment upon the fact that memory 
is always busy at such anniversary seasons. The im- 
portant thing is the material with which memory deals. 
And here let us note, in the first place, that if life is 
viewed by us merely as a succession of events, if mem- 
ory is concerned only with the journal of each day's do- 
ings or gains or pleasures or disasters, it has unlimited 



52 FROM BEYOND JORDAN, 

possibilities of sadness : it is more likely to be sad than 
joyful. The world must pass away, friends must die, for- 
tune will change, sorrow is inevitable. 

But you observe that the Psalmist's retrospect, though 
it touches the sorrowful facts of change and loss, does 
not centre in them. The great fact in his review of the 
past is God: moreover, that fact is brought out more 
sharply by his sorrow, just as the overcasting of the sun 
often throws a prominent object into clearer outline. 
" My soul is bowed down within me, therefore will I re- 
member Thee." God in the foreground of memory, is 
our theme to-day. Let us take our illustrations from 
the scenery of the text. 

The prospect from the Hermons and from Mizar, the 
little hill, was full of points consecrated by their histories 
of God's special manifestation and help. The whole 
land, for that matter, had been God's gift and had been 
won by His saving help. 

There, first, was Mahanaim. It was there that the 
angels of God met Jacob as he was going to meet Esau. 
The vision of the ladder at Bethel was repeated in an- 
other form. God's host joined itself to Jacob's band as 
an assurance of protection, and hence the patriarch gave 
the place the name of Mahanaim or " the two hosts." 

Into the memories of a great many men, the thought 
of single-handedness enters, sometimes as a matter of 
boast, sometimes as a matter of bitterness. There are 
men so proud and self-reliant, that they would exclude 
from the memory of their success in life, if they could, 
all thought of help from God or man. They are self- 



FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 53 

made men, they tell you, owing their success to their 
own energy, and owing no thanks to anybody. One 
host has gained their victories — the body of their own 
resources. Jacob started from home to seek his fortunes 
with this ideal of success ; but before he had gone far on 
his journey he received a reminder of another and higher 
ideal. The vision of Bethel, of the steps joining earth 
and heaven, of heavenly ministers going up and down 
between God and men, of God promising protection 
and the gift of the land whereon the sleeper lay, told 
Jacob that another host was to take part in his career, 
and that the principal part : that God had something to 
say and do about Jacob's future. It took Jacob a long 
time to realize that fact. He seemed to realize it when 
he rose from his dream at Bethel ; but like so many men 
who yield for the moment to the power of a vivid im- 
pression, the lesson lost its hold on him for the time ; 
and his dealing with Laban showed that he had far more 
confidence in the one host made up of Jacob's shrewd- 
ness, cunning, and persistence, than in the alliance of the 
host of God. This lesson of the two hosts is the key to 
the providential economy of Jacob's life. Again and 
again, under different forms, the truth was brought 
home to him that no man can safely ignore God in 
working out His problem of life : that all real life-vic- 
tory is the victory of God's host. 

So then the lesson to-day is to the self-reliant, self- 
congratulating man, as he complacently reviews his life. 
In sharp contrast with him as he remembers the vigor- 
ous and successful push of his energy against the obsta- 



54 FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 

cles to fame and fortune, his storming of the steep 
heights of honor and wealth, are the words of the 
Psalmist, " I will remember Thee." Ah, strong, proud, 
self-complacent man, who call yourself self-made, if you 
but knew the whole truth, you would seek to be known 
by any other name than that. Self is a bungling work- 
man at best, and the self-made man must needs be a 
clumsy performance. The part of your life for which 
you take most credit to yourself is not of your own 
making. None the less because unrecognized, another 
hand has shaped that past of yours. The host of God 
has walked beside you, though unseen, through those 
days of struggle. The very conditions of your pros- 
perity, life, health, sight, reason, have been of another's 
making. The wonderful forbearance which has tolerated 
so long your exclusion of God from your recognition 
and gratitude, and has permitted the current of your 
prosperity to flow on unchecked, is not of your earn- 
ing. If, as you stand on the watershed between the old 
year and the new, you do not remember God, you are 
blind to the prime fact in your retrospect. Oh that He 
may anoint your eyes this morning, and cause all His 
goodness to pass before you, and bring you to your 
knees with confession and penitence and thanksgiving, 
saying, " I will remember Thee." 

Or, sometimes this thought of single-handedness 
carries with it bitterness. The man looks back over 
a life of lonely struggle, saying to himself, I should 
have been so glad of a little sympathy or a little help 
in my hard places ; but the hard, cold world passed me 



FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 55 

by without a word, and left me to fight alone as best I 
could. 

It may be, and very likely is, all true as regards the 
world, for i* is just like the world. But there is a sense 
in which it is not true, and the host which met Jacob at 
Mahanaim is the symbol of another and a sweeter truth. 
You have not been alone though you have thought 
yourself so. You have not been without sympathy and 
help though men have withheld them. No true man 
fights with one host only. And it is more than possible 
that, like Jacob, you have gotten in all these years an 
inkling of the truth. On a lonely road a man is wont to 
take up with whatever companion he can find ; and if 
God set you to walk that lonely path of yours so that 
you might find and walk with Him, you know whether 
He did you a service or not. You know whether the 
days when you had no company but God were the most 
miserable days of your life. Sometimes in your travels 
you have found in the chance acquaintance of your soli- 
tary days a man so true and wise and helpful, that you 
have even changed your own route that you might jour- 
ney farther in his company ; and it would not be strange 
if, when you had come into days more fruitful in com- 
panionship and in kindly ministries of men to yourself, 
you should have said to the Divine Friend of your lonely 
hours, "Abide with me. If Thy presence go not with 
me, carry me not up hence." In your retrospect of your 
lonely days, and of your single-handed struggle as you 
are pleased to call it, the first prompting of your heart 
is to say, " I will remember Thee." 



56 FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 

All the greater pity if you did not find Him out dur- 
ing all those days. All the greater pity if your eyes 
were holden so that you did not know Him. It was 
largely so with Jacob. God walked along by his side 
unrecognized, and yet met and helped him in the hour 
of his need. Oh, the wonderful, compassionate love of 
our Father in Heaven, who never takes His eye from us, 
though our eyes are turned everywhere else save upon Him. 
You and I have been so often self-engrossed, selfishly or 
morbidly as the case might be, thinking only of our own 
skill and resources in fighting our battles, and yet God 
struck for us in our need, though we had not called Him 
in, though perhaps we had wronged Him by thinking Him 
far off and careless whether we conquered or fell. We 
attach often a hard and severe meaning to the idea of 
God's reminders. And yet God does not always remind 
us of Himself by a blow. His most potent reminders 
are often in the form of an undeserved blessing. Your 
experience has been a very strange one if it does not in- 
clude something of this kind ; if sometimes you have not 
found in some generous act of divine love a sharper re- 
proach than the most stinging rebuke. It was the pres- 
ence of the hosts of God which brought from the world- 
ly Jacob the confession, " I am not worthy of the least 
of all the mercies and of all the truth which Thou hast 
showed unto Thy servant." 

Not far from Mahanaim was the brook Jabbok, the 
scene of Jacob's mysterious struggle with the covenant 
angel. I pity the man who can find in that story nothing 
but a myth or a legend. I do not pretend to understand 



FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 57 

all the deep meaning of that incident, but I am not con- 
cerned to take the supernatural element out of the Bible ; 
for if I could succeed, I should be tempted to throw into 
the fire what was left : and so, until I can find some bet- 
ter authority than that which handles Old Testament 
story in that unceremonious fashion, I shall take the 
story of Jacob's wrestle as I find it, and shall continue 
to believe that, in this mysterious fashion, God met Ja- 
cob and revealed Himself to him there by the brook 
Jabbok. 

God, by the revelation of the angels at Mahanaim, 
had given Jacob assurance of help : but so far, the assur- 
ance was general. God's help includes a good many 
things, and some which seem to the man, for the time 
being, like hindrances rather than helps. God's help is 
not confined to extricating a man from the special diffi- 
culty in which he finds himself. Sometimes indeed He 
does not extricate him, as when He refused to relieve 
Paul of the thorn in the flesh. God's chief aim in all 
His dealings with individual men is character. All the 
help, comfort, light which He gives, all the struggle, the 
darkness, the defeat which He permits, are with a view 
to make the man himself more godlike. And hence the 
deliverance of Jacob from the just anger of Esau was only 
one part, and the minor part, of God's purpose. It was 
a comparatively simple matter to pacify Esau, but it was 
a much greater matter to recast that calculating, tricky, 
worldly-minded Jacob into a Prince of God. And that 
was what God meant — to bring that life-long antagonism 
between selfishness and duty, between reliance on self 



58 FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 

and reliance on God, to a crisis. Not the winning of the 
birthright, not the purloined blessing, not the visions of 
Bethel and of Mahanaim, but the wrestle at Jabbok was 
the critical point in Jacob's moral history. The wrestle 
was foreshadowed at Bethel. 

God's choice of that man for such a high destiny- 
is a mystery. There is some reason for it in the 
moral possibilities of the man which God knows, but 
which we cannot detect until we come to Jabbok. 
It comes out there : a moral fibre which has been 
overlaid by his cunning and conceit all these years, but 
which stiffens into moral muscle at the touch of the 
covenant angel. The very man of all others, who, 
we should think, would break down at just such a 
moral crisis, whose life has given scarce a hint of the 
moral quality he develops in that struggle, comes out 
gloriously, with a tremendous force of will which faces 
God, and, breast to breast, and girdled with the arm of 
omnipotence, cries, " I will not let Thee go except Thou 
bless me." He had been brought to a point where strat- 
agem and strength alike failed ; where he could only 
cling to God ; where the issue was God's blessing or 
nothing. He won His blessing, and the Supplanter was 
baptized anew as God's Prince. 

Such crises are searching tests of a man's moral quality. 
All his manhood is involved in the answer to the question 
what he will do when he has nothing but God. All men 
are not equal to that test. God does not impose it on all 
men, though He puts hints and foreshadowings of it into 
their lives. But while such crises are the most awful in 



FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 59 

men's lives, the victory which they bring out of them is 
the most d^ oive and the most radical and far-reaching 
in its consequences. It sets a mark on character deeper 
than any other event of the whole life. Some of you 
have met such crises. In one way or another they have 
come to you — it may have been in business ; it may have 
been on the line of your religious experience ; it may have 
been that a great sorrow has been put into your naked 
hands and you have had nobody but God to teach you 
what to do with it : the struggle may have come on the 
line of your intellectual doubts : in any case it has marked 
a turning-point in your life. And the question with you, 
as you review the past, is not whether you have weath- 
ered the business storm and escaped financial shipwreck ; 
not whether you have been able to forget the sorrow in 
later pleasures ; not whether you have successfully parried 
or answered a question or resolved a religious doubt. No, 
the question is, what strengthened and deepened moral 
quality you have brought out of these crises. As you 
look back to them, is God the object which fills the field 
of vision? Have you come out of them with a convic- 
tion like Jacob's that nothing is of any worth without 
God's blessing? Have you come out with a song of 
praise though the wrestle has lamed you ? Have you 
come out, able to say, though stricken and disappointed, 
" I have kept the faith : my moral manhood is unim- 
paired, because with all my losses I have kept God. The 
best of all is, God is with me "? Oh, my brother, it seems 
idle to talk of victory and praise while deep calleth unto 
deep, and all the waves and billows are going over you, 



60 FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 

and your soul is bowed down within you ; but believe 
me, you have already won the greatest victory of your 
life if to-day you can stand amidst the flying spray, 
drenched and weak and weary, and say, " Therefore will 
I remember Thee." 

But this scene of our Psalm gives us another lesson. 
It was from these heights that Moses looked upon the 
Land of Promise which he was not to enter. Sore, sore 
disappointment, as we view it. Was it for this that he 
had been taken from the river reeds, trained in the royal 
schools of Egypt, his faith and patience disciplined in the 
solitudes of Horeb : for this that he had borne the mur- 
murings and rebellions of an ungrateful people, and had 
given his ripest years to fit them for citizenship and con- 
quest, all the while cheered and sustained by the thought 
of that better time which was coming, only to be stopped 
short on the very borders of the promised land, to be 
shown its goodliness and beauty only to be forbidden to 
enter ? It was his own fault, it may be said. So much 
the worse. Moses might have been pardoned for think- 
ing that the strain on his patience had been harder than 
most men had had to bear, and that his forty years' loyal 
service might have been an offset to his single error. None 
the less it was his own fault, and Moses was not the man 
to rebel at God's decision. He knew very well that God 
would not forget his services. He knew that a longer, 
sweeter rest awaited him than any which Canaan could 
give. Probably he saw, with the wisdom which comes 
with years to such men as he, that he was not the man 
to lead the work of battle and conquest which awaited 



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- , : : r assurance tics.: = 

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such a retrospect : anger, bitterness, misanthropy. _ 
can read for yourselves what Moses brought out of 

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I. wingless* thought mys^tf oa high to lift 



62 FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 

Among the winged. I set these feet that halt 
To run against the swift." 

We have thrown, and have not won. We have run, 
but others have been swifter, and it has settled down in- 
to certainty that we shall never win what we have striven 
for. What then ? What are we thinking of this morn- 
ing? Is it our disappointment? Is it the coldness and 
unhelpfulnessof those who should have been our friends? 
Is it our wounded pride ? Or are we remembering God ? 
Have we gotten under our feet the infidel falsehood that 
God is on the side of the heaviest battalions? Have we 
gotten some grasp upon the truth that God is the God of 
the unsuccessful? Have we learned that he who has lost 
everything, and yet has kept hold on God, is successful ? 
Yes, brother, you have failed in winning what you wanted, 
but you have not lost God. The time may come when 
you will look down on the maze of your life which 
now seems such a labyrinth, and see the order in the 
maze and learn that it was better you should fail. Had 
you fixed success in that particular thing as the reward 
of your striving? You have learned a lesson, cheaply 
bought at the price of your disappointment, if you 
have learned that God fixes His own rewards, and 
that they are often different and always better than 
those which we covet. It was one of the bitterest 
and most fearfully significant things that even Christ 
could say of the hypocrites and self-righteous, " They 
have received their . reward." You have made hon- 
est effort and have failed. You have not gotten the 
reward you coveted, but you have God. You have failed 



FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 63 

perhaps through your own fault : that is the bitterest 
thing of alii out still you have God, long-suffering, 
compassionate, forgiving, who heals your backsliding, 
who loves you, not because you are successful or per- 
fect, but simply out of the divine impulse of His own 
being. You can still serve Him, though not in the way 
you wished. You can still enjoy Him, if not through 
the medium of the earthly good you craved. Your fail- 
ure has not been a curse if, as you look back on it to- 
day, you can say, " Therefore will I remember Thee." 

Once more. From those heights Jordan was in sight. 
There, at the full tide of the harvest season, when the wa- 
ters flowed with a deep, strong current, the floods had 
been arrested, and the host of God, following the ark, had 
passed over dry-shod. It is no wonder that that stream, 
the boundary-line of the Land of Promise, has passed 
into sacred song as the type of death, not only as the 
dividing-line between the old land and the new, but as 
the scene of God's most gracious deliverances. Some of 
you have cause to remember Jordan this morning, and 
memory peoples the bank with familiar forms, waving 
farewell ere they stepped down into the swift, cold 
stream, and vanished from your sight. Your soul is 
bowed down under this memory, and no wonder. And 
yet, I take it, you remember something more than the 
stream and the vanished faces. If this were all, the 
retrospect would be sad indeed ; but you remember God. 
You remember how His rod and staff comforted those 
failing hearts. The precious treasure of your memory, 
embalmed for all time, which not even death can take 



64 FROM BEYOND JORDAN. 

away, is the fact that those lives were shaped and 
moulded by God, and lived out in fidelity to God, and 
ended in the peace of God, and have been taken up by 
God to be changed from glory to glory as by His pres- 
ence, and are forever with the Lord. There is this 
blessing attaching to our faith, that the thought of God 
dominates the thought of death. And one of the most 
precious reflections connected with our sad memories of 
death, is that of the glory and perfection, of the new 
conditions of growth and of moral power into which 
death transfers these dear ones. I heard a brother min- 
ister tell a story of a poor, ignorant 'longshoreman whom 
he visited on his dying bed, and who was tormented by 
the thought of the grave and of the fearful change 
which would pass upon his poor body. The minister 
quoted to him, " I will write upon him My new name "; 
and, "His name shall be in their foreheads." A light 
came into his eyes. His harsh features were glorified. 
" I'm going then," said he, " into the next world like a 
new-born baby; and God, He is my Father; and He'll 
christen me with a new name ; and He'll name me after 
Himself, just as if I'd never lived before ; and neither 
saints nor devils will know anything of old John and his 
sins." And then, raising himself with the remnant of 
his fast failing strength, and lifting his hands, he cried 
out, " O, but that's glorious ! that's glorious ! I thank 
my God ! " Brethren, death has not been a curse if it has 
enabled you to say, " Therefore will I remember Thee." 
So then the past is behind us. The dawn of the New- 
Year reddens the hill-tops. As we look back, let us re- 



FROM BE YOND JORDAN. 65 

member God. How can we help it as we review this 
year so crowded with His mercies ? I had almost said, 
How can we remember anything else? We are wishing 
each other " \ nappy New-Year." We have its happi- 
ness in our own hands. We have only to put our hand 
in God's and the thing is done. 



V. 

CREATING AND CARRYING. 

" I have made, and I will bear ." — Isaiah xlvi. 4. 

In this chapter the scene of the first paragraph is laid 
in Babylon. In vision the prophet sees the most vener- 
ated idols overthrown by the conqueror and carried 
away. "Bel," the tutelary deity of Babylon, "hath 
bowed down." " Nebo," the Babylonian Mercury, 
"hath crouched." Their idols are given up to the 
beasts and to the cattle. The images which were car- 
ried in procession by the priests and nobles, are resigned 
to common beasts of burden. If the great Bel and Ne- 
bo had been really gods, they would have interposed for 
the rescue of their images, but they have not been able 
to rescue the burden, and their soul hath gone into cap- 
tivity. 

The key-note of the passage is given by the figure of 

a burden or load, which the heathen gods are unable to 

bear. In contrast with their helplessness, the prophet 

emphasizes the power of Jehovah, carrying on still the 

figure of bearing a load. Historically, God has carried 

His people from the beginning. None have been able 

to pluck them out of His hand. This great burden of a 

nation to be shaped and developed, with all its ignorance 

and sin and perverseness, with its political complications, 
(66) 



CREATING AND CARRYING. 6j 

with its entanglements with contemporary heathenism — 
Jehovah has shown Himself able to carry it, and will 
carry it to thtf .nd. " Even to old age I am the same, 
and even to gray hairs I will bear. I have made, and I 
will carry, and I will bear and will rescue." 

In our text the two ideas of creating and carrying are 
thrown together, and in such a way as to show that they 
are related : that in the fact of God the Creator, lies en- 
folded the fact of God the Redeemer. " I have made, 
and I will bear." 

We must not let the fact of redemption, wonderful as 
it is, throw the fact of creation into the background ; be- 
cause the two are inseparably linked. Redemption, in 
one sense, grows out of creation. Because God made 
man in His own image, He is bent on restoring him to 
that image. Because God made us, God loves us, edu- 
cates us, bears with us, carries on the race on the line of 
His infinite patience, ministers to us with help and sym- 
pathy, is burdened with our perverseness and blindness, 
yea, comes down in person into the sphere of our hu- 
manity and takes its awful load of sin and sorrow and 
pain and death upon Himself. 

Let us look at this fact in certain familiar aspects. In 
anything that one makes he has a peculiar interest. With 
men, this interest is quite independent of the intrinsic 
value or importance of the thing. The fact that one has 
made a thing, intensifies the sense of proprietorship, and 
constitutes him its champion. The young artist knows 
that his first picture stands no chance in comparison with 
the works of his masters, and yet that piece of canvas is 



68 CREATING AND CARRYING. 

more to him than a Raphael or a Rembrandt. Critics 
find fault, perhaps justly, but he dwells on the points 
which he has treated with loving care and enthusiasm. 
Something in him asserts itself above the cold testimony 
of knowledge. A thousand hopes and fears and long- 
ings and cherished conceits have gone into the picture 
which none but himself know. It is his. He made it. 
The critic says it is not to be borne. He not only can 
bear it, but can hang it up in his room and live with it and 
love it because it is his own. The house which a man 
has erected with his own hands, though it be only a log- 
cabin ; the piece of land which he has purchased by the 
sweat of his brow, and has made verdant and fruitful by 
his own toil, have an interest quite apart from their 
market-value or from architectural merit. And this 
sentiment reaches high - water - mark in the parental 
relation. One's own child ! If parental love de- 
pended on the beauty or the mental endowment 
of children, the world would be peopled with orphans. 
The parental instinct, as you know, is quite indepen- 
dent of these things. Speak to a mother about the 
ugliness or the stupidity of her child, her only an- 
swer is to fold him closer in her arms. He is a poor 
cripple among the little ones who bound and dance 
around him ; but for him are her tenderest words, the 
choicest dainties, the hoarded wealth of love. Love 
seems to thrive on defect. Those of you who are famil- 
iar with the poems of Wordsworth will remember how 
that idea is worked out in the little poem of " The Idiot 
Boy." 



CREATING AND CARRYING. 69 

And the same fact holds on the moral side. Parental 
love is not conditioned on a child's goodness. Parental 
care does not relax because a child sins. Love follows 
the son down int| , the deeps of sin, keeps a hand on him, 
counts no sacrifice too dear to win him back, bears with 
insult and neglect. Over all the sense of personal wrong, 
wounded love, disappointed hope and pride, rises the 
thought, he is mine. 

All this is familiar enough. Are we afraid to carry 
the truth farther up — up to God? Are we of those who 
say that God must be just and may be merciful — as if 
mercy were not one of His essential attributes as well as 
justice ? Why should the " must " hold in the one case 
any more than in the other? If God must be just, He 
must be merciful. If justice is a necessity of His being, 
mercy is equally a necessity. A strange fashion this of 
parcelling out the divine nature into sections, drawing 
the boundary-lines with mathematical sharpness, and 
then setting watches upon the frontiers, lest mercy 
should encroach on justice or love on truth. Let us 
cease trying to lay out the infinite according to the 
rules of a topographical survey. The great thing for us 
is not to study God from without, but to be in God : 
then the lines of His attributes will adjust themselves to 
our eye. It is only when we live inland, or keep in our 
voyaging close along shore, that the waters take on for 
us the character of division-lines between provinces or of 
distinct bays or estuaries. When we push out into the 
ocean, we lose sight of all that in the impression of one 
mighty flood that fills all the bays and creeks. The bot- 



;o CREATING AND CARRYING. 

torn of the sea is divided by mountains and valleys, but 
the sea itself fills and covers them all. We care little 
whether a mountain or a valley is beneath our keel as 
we are borne on over the strong, deep swell. I know 
that it is the ocean tide that runs up between those trim 
stone wharves ; but I do not look on the labyrinth of 
docks and say, " That is the sea." I leave the docks 
when I put out to sea. " We must make docks," you 
say, " so long as we are on shore. We must have places 
for mooring and unlading truth." Quite true. It is nec- 
essary that theology and ethics, dwelling here within the 
limits of the finite, should construct channels and basins 
for truth. Be it so. All well, so long as we do not 
mistake the channels and basins for the ocean. Jus- 
tice, truth, mercy, and all the rest are in the divine na- 
ture ; are all in due proportion and perfect adjustment ; 
but they blend with each other and include each other 
in a way which defies our triangulating. That seer who 
was swept into the heavens from the savage rocks of 
Patmos, saw both mercy and judgment in his vision. 
He saw the Lamb leading His people to living fountains 
and wiping away all tears from their eyes : and he saw 
Him that sitteth upon the white horse, the Lord of war 
and righteousness, out of whose mouth goeth a sharp 
sword. But he came back and told the Church, " God is 
love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and 
God in him." To dwell in Love is, therefore, to be with- 
in the limits of justice and truth as well as of those of 
mercy. 

But let us not lose sight of our point. All that is in- 



CREATING AND CARRYING. 



71 



eluded in the word " bear " is practically pledged to us in 
the fact of creation. One reason why we take so slowly 
to the idea of Gc| , s bearing or carrying us, is because we 
divorce it from the fact that He made us ; and we look 
at the bearing simply as a concession, forgetting that 
God the Redeemer is bound up with God the Creator. 
From our stand-point and with our crude notions of the 
relations between justice and mercy, it may seem that 
God is under no obligation to bear the sorrows and to 
sympathize with the infirmities and to deal tenderly with 
the errors which are due to man's sin. He is under no 
obligation imposed by any rightful claim of ours. But 
He is under an obligation stronger than that — an obliga- 
tion imposed by the stress of His own infinite love for 
the children He has created. The stress of obligation 
does not draw Him from our side : it pushes from Him 
toward us. It is the mighty outgoing of His own 
fatherly heart toward that which emanates from Himself 
and which He yearns to see restored to the image in 
which He made it. From this point of view, the im- 
pulse to bear for and with man is just as deep and spon- 
taneous and affectionate as the impulse to say in the be- 
ginning, "Let us make man in our own image." 

You find that in the New Testament. Take the para- 
ble of the Prodigal Son. What is at the bottom of the 
whole story but this truth of sonship ? It is that 
which defines the measure of the prodigal's sin. The 
very heart of the sin is rebellion against a father, and 
rupture of the natural tie. That also defines the fa- 
ther's longing, and the joy over the returning son, the 



72 CREATING AND CARRYING. 

free forgiveness and the festivity. The boy was as 
wretched and needy and generally disgusting when he 
appealed to his father, as when he appealed to the citi- 
zen swine-keeper; but it was not at all in the swine- 
keeper's line of thought to even pity him, much less to 
spread a table for him and give him the best robe and 
the choice fare. Only a Father would think of that for 
a son ; and, for the father, it was the most natural of all 
things to think of it. 

For, look you, we do not have any difficulty about 
this truth as between man and man. When a father 
turns his son out of doors, however blameworthy the 
boy may have been, we are concious of a kind of recoil 
from the act, such as we do not feel when a house- 
holder discharges a knavish servant, or a merchant dis- 
misses a thievish clerk. We say, " Yes, he was an un- 
worthy son, but then — he was his own son/' And fur- 
ther, we do not think it strange or wonderful that a 
mother goes on loving the son or the daughter who 
has brought disgrace on the house ; that she bears and 
forbears and hopes and cherishes long after the scant 
charity of the world is exhausted. We do not think it 
strange, I say, through our deep feeling of the strength 
of the natural tie between parent and child. Why 
should we think such a recognition strange on God's 
part ? Isaiah did not think so when he said, " Can a 
woman forget her sucking child that she should not 
have compassion on the son of her womb ? Yea, they 
may forget, yet will 1 not forget thee." And Christ did 
not think so when He said, " If ye, being evil, know 



CREATING AND CARRYING. 



73 



how to give good gifts unto your children, how much 
more shall your heavenly Father give good things to 
them that ask Him i God, and I say it reverently, and 
because He has said the same thing of Himself — God is 
under the stress of the parental instinct to take our sick- 
nesses and to bear our infirmities, and He yields to it, 
gives Himself up to it in His own divine measure. He 
is the God who says, " I have made, and I will bear." 

I am saying nothing which goes to mitigate the essen- 
tial badness of sin, or God's hatred of it, or to deny the 
fact of God's punishment of it. Even fatherhood has 
limitations. God cannot restore his erring child with- 
out Conditions. Simply to forgive the past is not enough. 
God aims at the perfect establishment of the filial rela- 
tion, and that cannot be without a filial heart in the son, 
and the son's cheerful obedience. If the prodigal had 
not come back repentant, he would not have had the 
robe and the ring. This parental feeling, and its mani- 
festation on God's part, are, as already hinted, the things 
which throw the enormity of sin into the highest relief. 

Bearing this in mind, let us now go on to consider 
some of the aspects under which this truth of God's 
bearing manifests itself. 

It appears as a matter of tolerance. It is perfectly 
clear from the Bible that God's love for His children 
makes Him bear patiently with their infirmities and er- 
rors. When an enthusiastic sculptor has once conceived 
the idea of a statue, he is not daunted by hardness in 
the stone, nor by defects in the grain. He is bent on 
carrying out his cherished ideal. The greater the diffi- 
4 



74 CREATING AND CARRYING. 

culties, the more his energies are called out. Are we to 
suppose that God conceives a purpose less sharply or 
works it out with less intensity than a man does ? Not 
so indeed. From our stand-point, God's undertakings 
are formidable ; bristling with difficulties ; for He does 
not, as He might, decree the thing done by one arbitrary 
act of His will, but lets the human element into the pro- 
cess, with its times and seasons and rates of growth 
and clash of passions. None the less, through whatever 
process of work or of waiting, of doing or of bearing, 
God means that the thing shall be done, and it is. There 
is the history of Israel. The development of that nation 
was a stupendous task. You know the details of that 
history ; there is not time to dwell on them ; but one 
fact pervades the entire record — the long-suffering pa- 
tience of God. That comes out, if in nothing else, in 
the element of time which marks the history. It is a 
long history. Take one single fact, that it required all 
the years from the Exodus to the carrying away into 
Babylon to get the idea of one only living and true God 
practically lodged in the people's heart. It was lodged 
at last. But God could wait and bear. How long He 
waited, and how much He bore. How He tolerated 
characters and customs at which Christian sentiment re- 
volts ; institutions which it has banished ; men like Ja- 
cob and Samson ; women like Rebecca and Jael, until 
the time was ripe for a John and a Mary, a Phcebe and 
a Priscilla. How He bore with national petulance and 
apostasy, and saw His own sun shine day after day on 
the idol altars upon every hill-top : smote the people, 



CREATING AND CARRYING. 



75 



yet ever called them back and forgave and blessed them 
when they came. 

" Bare and carried them all the days of old." Yes, 
and cherishes them still in His heart. Israel, though 
scattered and despised, has a place yet in Jehovah's love. 
The eye which followed her out of Egypt on the night 
of the Exodus, and through the sea and the desert, is on 
her still, and some old prophecies which lie back in dark- 
ness and dust shall flash into new meaning some day 
when Israel shall return unto the Lord. 

God's wonderful patience shames us. We get into 
bitter, pettish frames of mind over the prevalence of 
fraud and of godless luxury, over the high-handed inso- 
lence of demagogism ; and we are tempted to say, per- 
haps do say, " Why does not God arise in His might, 
and sweep away the whole mass at a stroke?" Doubt- 
less that is what some of us would do if we could. We 
would call down fire from heaven. We would root out 
the tares at once. Well for us, well for humanity that we 
cannot. Meanwhile God bears. The tares spring up with 
the wheat. The wicked has no doubtful success. He is in 
great power and spreads himself like a green bay-tree. 
God bears. He has not only His purpose, but His method. 
Let us never forget that Christ resisted the temptation 
to step at once to an absolute but external sovereignty. 
His deeper ideal of a sovereignty founded in the free, 
intelligent acceptance of the principles of the Kingdom 
of God, would take time and blood and tears, yet would 
He wait and bear. He had made humanity in His own 
image, He would not restore it to anything lower. 



76 CREATING AND CARRYING. 

We have seen God's bearing under the aspect of 
tolerance, and have seen it illustrated historically. The 
same truth is formulated in dogma, taking more dis- 
tinctly into itself, along with mere tolerance, the facts of 
compassion, sympathy, and practical helpfulness. This 
idea of bearing is at the root of the doctrine of Christ's 
atonement. So it is foreshadowed by Isaiah in his 
prophecy of Him who took our infirmities and bare our 
sicknesses. It is of the very nature and essence of love, 
and pre-eminently of parental love, to bear. " Love," 
as one has said, " is essentially vicarious." It does not 
wait for the burdens of its object to be laid upon it. It 
reaches out after them to transfer them to itself. 

I have said before, and I repeat it, for it is a truth 
which should be bedded in the foundations of your s 
Christian thought, that we must try and reach a larger 
conception of the atonement of Christ than the one 
which is popularly held, and which makes it substantial- 
ly a mere business adjustment between God and a sin- 
ful world : a settlement of accounts ; a setting of men 
right as regards the letter and the penalty of the law. 
A real atonement must touch the inmost personality 
of the man, and must include his transformation into 
the image of God no less than the adjustment of his 
legal relations. Pardon is included in atonement, but 
atonement is more than pardon. That governor may 
pardon a criminal, but the pardon does not make the 
criminal over into an honest and pure man. I repeat, 
God will be satisfied with nothing short of the restora- 
tion of man to His image : nothing- short of a filial na 



CREATING AND CARRYING. 



77 



ture in the man : nothing short of an inward oneness of 
man with God answering to the relation of Christ with 
the Father. That is | prist's own plainly-stated ideal : 
" That they may be one even as we are one : I in them, 
and Thou in me, that they may be perfected into one." 
The purpose of the atonement is vastly larger than to 
keep men out of perdition. It is to save men, but also 
to make men, and to save them by making them. Such 
a work as this involves mediation. Job saw dimly, 
centuries before Christ came, saw through the driving 
mists of his own bitter agony, that man needed a daysman 
— one who could stand between him and God and lay a 
hand on them both : one who could stand between hu- 
man weakness and sorrow and sin, and the infinite holi- 
ness of the divine : one who could unite in himself the 
susceptibilities to the influences from both sides : who 
could be one with God, yet touched with the feeling of 
our infirmities. And therefore, in a world of erring 
children of God where a process of reconciliation is at 
work, the cross must have a place and the highest place 
— the cross which is the expression of burden-bearing 
love. Atonement means love shouldering man and car- 
rying him out of sin up to God : and in order to do this 
some one must go down into the sin where he is, and 
put himself within reach of the thrust of all its anguish 
and sorrow, and lay his heart open to its feeling while 
He pushes and guides the man steadily upward. 

That is what God in Christ does. He bears man on 
His heart. I see that man of sorrows, Christ Jesus, 
go away under the olives of Gethsemane. It is not for 



78 CREATING AND CARRYING. 

human thought to fathom the awful secrets of that hour. 
In the light of Scripture and of Christ's avowed purpose 
and of His work in the world, we can catch some glimpses 
into the depth of that agony. Of the two, I am not 
sure that the agony of Gethsemane was not to Him more 
bitter than the agony of Calvary. He never prayed on 
Calvary as He did in the garden, " If it be possible let 
this cup pass from me." Now and then a true, thought- 
ful man, who studies and discerns the signs of the times, 
and follows the evolution of religious thought in the 
world, is driven into a kind of desperation as the ele- 
ments of the vast problem of a renewed humanity crowd 
thickly upon him : as history sends up its testimonies, 
and the discordant voices of the time pour in at his 
windows, and the promises and declarations of the word 
of God present themselves in such apparently startling 
contrast with the facts. Such an one may possibly get 
a glimpse of the tide which rolled in upon Christ's soul 
there under the olive trees : the history of humanity 
from the beginning ; the track of sin through the old 
empires ; the carnivals of blood and lust ; the gropings 
of blind souls for the truth ; the awful secrets of the 
great cities; the stubbornness of human pride; the foul 
idolatries of human fanaticism ; altars reeking with blood ; 
alternate butchery and sensuality : then the long perspec- 
tive of the years to come, through which his simple and 
pure truth should fight its way, and gradually draw men 
nearer to God ; the stabs in the house of His own 
friends ; the coldness and apathy of the Church for 
which His blood was to be poured out. It all came 



CREATING AND CARRYING. 79 

rushing together upon His soul. No man could help 
Him there. He must tread that fearful wine-press alone. 
He must face that awful mass of woe and corruption, 
past as well as future,! A know in His inmost being that 
He, He alone stood between all this and God. Do you 
wonder that His sweat was of great drops of blood ? Do 
you wonder that the humanity of Him cried out : " If it 
be possible, let this cup pass from me " ? There is the 
comment on our text. There it is translated into flesh 
and blood : " I have made, and I will bear." 

The truth also comes out experimentally in the Chris- 
tian life of each one of us. I cannot dwell here. I can 
only refer you to your own experience, which, if you will 
read with open eyes and heart, will be a very fruitful 
comment on this truth. Every one of us, if he is hon- 
est with himself, knows that God has had much to bear 
with him, and knows, too, how patiently God has borne 
it : and every one of us has had experience of God's 
bearing in the sense of sympathetic love and helpful- 
ness. How many of us know from most blessed experi- 
ence what it is to have a great High Priest touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities. How many of us have 
known what it was to have Him bear our heavy load for 
us ; and therefore, in the way that lies before us, camwe 
not trust in larger measure the love of Him who made 
us to bear with us? We are stubborn subjects, hard 
material ; can we not believe in God's purpose to shape 
us ? Shall we believe that every knot and gnarl which 
He encounters in the process only excites His anger? 
Has He dealt with the knots and gnarls thus far like 



8o CREATING AND CARRYING. 

one who was wroth with us ? Look up. We are in the 
hands of Him who made us. God makes nothing in 
vain. When He made man in His own image, He did 

■ 

not make him to gratify a caprice, or in mere wanton- 
ness of power. He made him with a solemn, an awful, 
a glorious purpose over which He took heaven into 
counsel : and be sure that he will accomplish that pur- 
pose, that his patience shall not fail, that He who made 
will bear until He shall have perfected His work. 

And meanwhile let us not forget the lesson of His 
bearing as it speaks to us of duty. Let us not presume 
on it. The fact of this loving purpose and of the pa- 
tience, the tolerance, the sympathy with which He car- 
ries it out, throws into strongest relief the enormity of 
the sin which resists the purpose and tramples upon the 
patience. 

" He that shuts love out, in turn shall be 
Shut out from love." 



VI. 

THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 

" Thou shall keep them secretly in a pavilion from the 
strife of tongues" — Psalm xxxi. 20. 

The author of this Psalm had evidently suffered much 
from the talk of society. He had been reproached by 
his enemies ; he had heard the slander of many who 
took counsel together against him. The wicked had 
not been silent, and lying lips had spoken grievous 
things proudly and contemptuously. The strife of 
tongues had raged, and the arrows thereof had wounded 
him. 

In this, as in so many cases, the Psalmist strikes an 
answering chord in the common experience of men of 
all times. A large share of good men's troubles come 
out of the talk of others. Nor is this fact confined to 
great men or to public men. Every man has his own 
little public, and that public talks ; and even when it 
does not talk about him, the persistence and the endless 
variety of its talking, and many of the themes of its talk, 
often worry and annoy him so that he cries out for the 
wings of a dove, that he may fly away and be at rest in 
the wilderness from the strife of tongues. 

The text gives us two points : the strife of tongues 

and the hiding-place from it. 

4* (81) 



82 THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 

The strife of tongues ! What an expressive phrase 
that is. How the element of contention asserts itself in 
the great mass of the world's talk. I remember being 
once at a fair in a foreign city, and before each booth 
stood a crier, sometimes aided by musical instruments ; 
each crier endeavoring to raise his voice above the others 
in advertising the attractions of his show. It was a good 
picture of the world at large, where so many people have 
something to say, something which they are determined 
the world shall hear, no matter who else goes unheard. 

Then, how much debate there is. How much talk 
over questions, and those not always the most import- 
ant : how much wrangling and idle declamation over 
issues parted only by a hair's breadth. What waste of 
rhetoric and what seething of passionate words over 
matters which will be forgotten in a year, perhaps in 
less. 

Or again, while so many are fighting to tell the world 
something for its own good, as they declare, still more 
are they who are pleading with the world for their own 
good, and adding to the general din their blatant claims 
for the world's honors and emoluments. 

And then there is the hiss of slanderous tongues striv- 
ing against the innocent, and of gossiping tongues striv- 
ing which can tell most news — bad or good, false or 
true — it matters not. Is the picture of the old English 
divine overdrawn after all? Hear a few of his stately 
periods. " Every gossiping is as it were a court of jus- 
tice : every seat becometh a tribunal ; at every table 
standeth a bar, whereto all men are cited, whereat every 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 83 

man as it happeneth is arraigned and sentenced: no sub- 
limity, no integrity or innocence of life, no prudence or 
circumspection of demeanor can exempt any person 
from it ; not one es peth being taxed under some 
scandalous name or odious character, one or other. 
Not only the outward actions and visible practices of 
men are judged ; but their retired sentiments are 
brought under trial, their inward dispositions have a 
verdict passed on them, their final states are determined 
— yea, God himself is hardly spared, His providence com- 
ing under the bold obloquy of those who, as the Psalmist 
speaketh of some in his own time, whose race doth yet 
survive, speak loftily and set their mouth against the 
heavens." 

Now men, as we have said, get weary of this. There 
is no man who has not yearned to be where he could 
hear only the beatings of his own heart, out of reach of 
what men say of him or of any one else. We grow blinded 
and stunned by this excess of talk. The multitude of 
explanations and comments confuses us as to the truth. 
We want leisure to think, and to weigh and adjust things. 
We want men to stop talking so that we can talk to our- 
selves. If perchance a great seed-thought has floated to 
us on those winds of oratory and debate, we would fain 
give it time to strike its roots deep down into our minds 
and hearts. We ourselves are weary of hearing what 
men say of us and of what we do. We should be glad 
to have for a time the gift of being invisible and of being 
ourselves, and of doing our work without the constraint 
and incubus of the feeling that our simplest deed may 



84 THE REFUGE FROM TALK, 

be misinterpreted, and our frankest word twisted out of 
recognition. We are tired of hearing men talked over ; of 
hearing our best friends suspected, and the men we hon- 
or and trust most set aside with contempt, until we our. 
selves catch the taint and begin to ask, " Is there any 
pure man? Is any man trustworthy? Who shall show 
us any good ? " We want to get away where we can 
think our own thoughts of men : where we can indulge 
our hero-worship if it so please us, and give ourselves 
up, unchallenged, to the delusions (if delusions they be) 
of affection and admiration. 

And, once more, we grow ashamed of ourselves, if 
there is any true manhood left in us, because we are so 
often drawn, ourselves, into this current of talk about 
our neighbors. We hear the gossip, and we happen to 
know a fact or to have heard a piece of news, and almost 
ere we know it, in it goes into the common stock : and, 
if we are not very careful, we find ourselves falling into 
censorious talk, flinging out sharp arrows of sarcasm or 
pulling a neighbor's defects a little farther out into the 
light ; and when we come to sit down and think over 
what we have said, unless we are very much hardened, 
we feel ashamed and sorry, and indignant at ourselves, 
and are tempted to wish that we might never again be 
in society where people are talked over. 

Now, it will not do for us to defy public talk, and to 
show ourselves so independent of what men say as to do, 
wantonly, what shocks social sentiment and multiplies 
talk. For the talk of society is by no means an un- 
mixed evil. It hurts a good many men, and that un- 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 



85 



justly : but it also keeps not a few men steady. The 
fear which it begets in a certain class of minds is whole- 
some. No man should defy public sentiment on any 
issue short of an issu^ A moral principle. The man 
who declares his contempt for the opinion of his neigh- 
bor, and who wantonly goes in the face of it, proves 
himself not a brave man but a very unwise man. There 
have been cases where one man has been right and the 
rest of society wrong : but such cases are not as numer- 
ous as is sometimes supposed ; and while the voice of 
the people is by no means always the voice of God, a 
manly respect for public opinion, a manly desire for so- 
ciety's esteem are wholesome, divinely-planted, conserva- 
tive elements of sound character. 

Defiance of society then is not our refuge from the 
strife of tongues. What is it ? 

The world does not afford it. To get out of the reach 
of talk is to get out of society altogether ; and to get out 
of society is not only no man's duty, but it is the sin of 
any man who attempts it. There is a sentiment which 
finds its way into books now and then in very attractive 
guise, and which appeals powerfully to overworked men, 
the tendency of which is to exalt the life of pure con- 
templation as the ideal of a perfect life. It gives rise to 
very sweet talk about the calm of nature and about mus- 
ing on God and studying Him in His works, away from 
the din of cities and the ambitious strivings of men. 
But in reality it is the old monastic ideal of living, with 
the monastery left out. The principle is the same — 
harmless isolation from mankind. But the Bible, which 



86 THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 

says a great deal about various refuges for troubled men, 
says nothing about this kind of refuge. God provides 
better for men than by withdrawing them from the 
world where their work lies. Man is delivered from 
temptation, not by being taken out of it, but by being 
helped to conquer it. Paul was not relieved of the 
thorn in the flesh, but was given grace to bear it and to 
be a grand man in spite of it. Similarly man is not hid- 
den from the strife of tongues by being withdrawn from 
it. God has a better refuge than that, and that is Him- 
self. " Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy pres- 
ence from the pride of man : Thou shalt keep them secret- 
ly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues." In putting 
a man in right relations with Himself, God puts him in 
right relation to the world's talk. Let us look at some 
illustrations of this, growing out of what has been al- 
ready said. 

There is the matter of slander and abuse. God 
does not always exempt good men from these. The 
man of science delights to show you how he can handle 
fire, and even go into the fire unhurt. That is a greater 
achievement than keeping away from the fire. In like 
manner God shows His power to keep the feet of His 
saints, by letting the tongues of men run riot, and their 
fire concentrate its fury upon them, while they walk in 
peace and come out without the smell of fire on their 
garments. A good man is given to thinking that, if his 
good name in the world is gone, if the world's talk casts 
up nothing but mire and dirt, it is all over with him. 
God shows him that he can live, and live quietly and 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 87 

cheerfully, on the simple fact that the integrity of his 
heart and the cleanness of his hands are known to God. 
And sometimes, when men withdraw their praise, the 
slandered or misunderstood man finds out for the first time 
how sweet God's smile is. Sometimes when men with- 
draw their company, and leave him shut in with God, he 
discovers that in His presence is fulness of joy. There 
was Daniel. What a talk he made at court. The spies 
were on the watch at the hour of prayer, and surely 
enough, spite of the king's decree, Daniel appeared at 
his open window three times in the day, and prayed and 
gave thanks before his God. What a buzz of talk. How 
the spies hastened to the king's presence, bursting with 
the news. Daniel prays ! We saw him praying three 
times ! His window was open ; he did not even pretend 
to conceal his contempt for thy law, O king ! And so 
the whisper stole into the court, Daniel has disobeyed 
the king ! Daniel has prayed ! What a rich morsel of 
court gossip it was. What unconcealed delight that the 
unpopular Hebrew had at last fatally committed himself. 
What wise sayings were doubtless retailed over the lux- 
urious tables about the folly of the act. The thing took 
its own course. God was at no pains to save Daniel 
from the flood of talk, nor from the lions' den. He let 
slander do its worst. He suffered His servant to go down 
among the lions, and there Daniel found himself in the 
secret of God's tabernacle. God was there, and it 
mattered not what men or beasts were there beside. 
The world talks as if when everything but God fails a 
man, he is in desperate straits. The Bible puts it that 



88 THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 

at that point he is at his very best, most safe and most 
blessed. 

Sometimes God saves one from the strife of tongues 
by putting him where he cannot talk and where others 
cannot talk to him. He sends a calamity so overwhelm- 
ing that his friends do not know what to say to him, 
and the man himself cannot reason about it, cannot ar- 
gue, cannot explain, is simply reduced to silence. All 
that he can say is, " I am dumb ; I open not my mouth 
because Thou didst it." He must find his only explana- 
tion in that simple fact, God did it. God seems to say 
to him, " Be still ! There is only one thing you can 
know about this matter. Be still and know that I am 
God." And the man is forced to sit down and fix his 
eye on that one illuminated text shining in his darkness, 
" I am God." And for awhile it is like the handwriting 
on Belshazzar's wall ; but oh, how the meaning grows. 
What wonderful lessons men have learned by silently 
facing and pondering those three words : what inferences 
they draw, every one of which is a new hiding-place for 
the troubled soul, irradiated with divine light. " I am 
God, and therefore thy creator, and therefore have a right 
over thee and thine. I am God, and therefore thy re- 
deemer and sanctifier, and therefore I am purifying 
thee in the fire. I am God, and God is love, and 
therefore this trouble veils love. I am God, and there- 
fore there can be no mistake. I am God, and therefore 
I will give thee grace to meet thy trouble. I am 
God, and I who have torn can heal." Is not this a 
refuge better than all the wise talk of the world, better 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 



89 



than all its endless discussions on the origin and mean- 
ing of sorrow ? 

Again, God shields good men from the world's talk 
by hardening them against it. We all know that expo- 
sure is often the best remedy for certain bodily ailments, 
and that is a kind of cure which God not unfrequently em- 
ploys for moral infirmities. Often He will level every 
bulwark on the side on which one most craves shelter. 
Often He will expose one to the very thing from which 
he most shrinks. Again and again we have seen how 
the sensitive spirit which avoids publicity, which shivers 
at the world's comments, which hates the strife of con- 
troversy, is put under a steady fire of these. There is 
many a man who stands out in clear view, a mark for all 
the shafts of the tongue, who, you perhaps think, cares 
nothing for them ; who speaks his word and does his 
work as though deaf to all the babel of popular gossip ; 
but who, nevertheless, conceals a womanly sensitiveness 
under his bold front, and has had to learn how to school 
a timid heart not to flinch at censure. It is hard disci- 
pline, but oh, how much one learns under it. How one 
who has only God's purpose in his heart and God's work 
on his hands, gradually learns that the hardest things 
men can say are not so terrible after all. Archbishop 
Whately, of Dublin, who died in 1863, was among the 
sturdiest men of his time, a man of undaunted courage, 
and withal of that genuine originality which awakens 
comment and opposition. Much of his official life was 
passed under a fire of censure. He once said of him- 
self : " My stumbling-block most to be guarded against, 



90 THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 

the right hand and right eye that offended and was to 
be cut off, was the dread of censure. Few would con- 
jecture this from seeing how I have braved it all my 
life, and how I have perpetually been in hot water, 
when, in truth, I had a natural aversion to it. So I set 
myself resolutely to act as though I cared nothing for 
either the sweet or the bitter, and in time I got hard- 
ened. But no earthly object could ever pay me for the 
labor and the anguish of modelling my nature in these 
respects. I have succeeded so far that I have even 
found myself standing firm where some men of consti- 
tutional intrepidity have given way. And this will al- 
ways be the case more or less, through God's help, if we 
will but persevere, and persevere from a right motive." 

Again, God hides His servant from the strife of 
tongues by filling his hands with work for others. The 
more one is interested in the welfare of men, the less he 
will care for their talk ; for a good deal of sensitiveness 
is merely selfishness, after all. When people are self- 
conscious and more anxious about the impression they 
are making than about doing God's will in serving their 
neighbors, they are keenly alive to what is said of them. 
That is a kind of sensitiveness which may be cured ; and 
the best way of curing it is to get the life filled with 
Christ's spirit of ministry. Get hold of some object 
which stirs up the deep places in your heart : some work 
which lays the pressure of its " must be done " not only 
on your conscience but on your love, and the kind of 
figure you are making will pass out of your thought. 
What the world may be saying of you will go by like 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 



91 



the idle wind. I am talking of what I know. I had one 
lesson (if you will pardon the personal reminiscence) 
written deep on my heart, when, with several others, I 
went with the Christian Commission during the war to 
assist in nursing the sick and wounded. I was peculiar- 
ly sensitive to the sight of physical suffering, and my 
friends laughed at me, and said, " You will faint at the 
first sight of blood ": and in my inmost heart I was 
afraid I should, and shrank from the ridicule I should 
bring upon myself. And I well remember how I trem- 
bled inwardly when they put a little pail and sponge 
into my hand, and sent me down to a barge which they 
were loading with wounded men to carry them to the 
hospitals in Washington, and told me to moisten the 
stiff bandages and cool the hot heads and hands. Ah ! 
what a sight it was ! God grant this fair land may never 
witness such scenes again. But from the moment that I 
sat down beside the first man that met my eye, a poor 
fellow with a musket-bullet through his jaw, and tried, 
while I applied the cooling water, to drop a word or 
two about Christ and His rest for the weary — all my 
shrinking vanished. I thought only of those wounded 
men. I had little or no self-consciousness left. I 
saw only that colossal misery. That experience was 
worth a great deal to me, and that is the reason I 
tell it to you, for it illustrates a universal truth. Get 
yourself thoroughly interested in other people's bodies 
and souls ; get the question " What can I do for them ?" 
uppermost in your thought, and the world's gossip about 
you will attract as little notice as the drifting sea-weed 



9 2 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 



borne to your feet on one tide only to be swept out by 
the next. 

And I need scarcely add that this is the best way to 
keep ourselves from being sharers in the world's gossip. 
He who dwells in the secret of God's presence learns to 
take God's attitude toward infirmity and error — the atti- 
tude of One who is touched with the feeling of men's in- 
firmities ; of One who remembers that His children are 
dust, and pities them accordingly. The tongue of such 
an one will not be a weapon of strife. It will send forth 
better and sweeter things than censures and sarcasms 
and ungenerous criticisms. 

These are some of the methods in which God hides 
His people from the strife of tongues ; and all these 
methods are embraced in this one comprehensive fact — 
that He hides them in the hiding-place of His presence. 
If we sum up in a word that which meets our craving to 
escape from the strife of tongues, we say, our hiding-place 
is God. The hiding-place of Thy presence, Thy taber- 
nacle — those are parallel expressions, the one literal, the 
other figurative, and they are very suggestive. Literally 
the first means " the hiding-place of Thy countenance." 
Think of it. Hidden in the light of God's face. Hidden 
in that splendor where His power is hidden. And if we 
want the New Testament key to this passage, we have it 
in Paul's Epistle to the Colossians : " Your life is hid with 
Christ in God." There never was a man so talked about 
and cursed and criticised and reviled as was Christ ; and 
yet His attitude to the world's talk is very easily per- 
ceived. He does not grow irritated at the constantly 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 93 

repeated challenges and demands for explanation of His 
work and purpose. His heart is full of pity. He weeps 
because Jerusalem will not hear His words of life, and 
utters those paradoxes as they must have seemed to 
His disciples, " Blessed are ye when men shall say all 
manner of evil against you falsely for my sake." " Woe 
unto you when all men shall speak well of you." And 
the secret of all was that He dwelt in God, in absolute 
oneness with the Father. One whose sympathies were 
all with God's, whose purpose lay in the exact direction 
of God's, whose life was the larger life of God, could well 
afford to despise men's talk. It must have seemed to 
Him the most infinitesimal of trifles, so far as it related 
to Himself or to His work. And this condition it is the 
privilege of God's servant to share with Christ. Like 
Christ's life, with Christ's life, his life may be hid in 
God ; and just to the degree in which his life is so hid- 
den is he out of the range of the world's talk, and it 
ceases to harm him. There he is safe from the arrows 
of slander. There he is occupied with better and higher 
things than those which form the staple of the world's 
talk. There he is in the presence and under the eye of 
the infinite Judge, and feels how small a thing it is to be 
judged of men. There he is on intimate terms with 
the wisest of counsellors, and needs not to shape his 
course by the labored, prejudiced, contradictory wisdom 
of men. There he sees only right and not worldly pol- 
icy, and learns to be right and to let policy take care of 
itself. " If any man walk in the day he stumbleth not, 
because he seeth the light of this world." He who 



94 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 



walks in the sunlight needs no torches to guide his 
steps. He need care nothing if all the torches in the 
world be extinguished. And thus he who lives in the 
unclouded light of God's presence needs not the lights 
of men's kindling which flicker and flare in the changing 
gusts of popular opinion. He is like one who looks 
down from a chamber irradiated with pure light upon 
men stumbling and groping through a dimly-lighted 
street, and crying to him to come down and walk by 
their light. 

And therefore, to quote the beautiful words of a liv- 
ing preacher — living in the best sense — " If we are really 
Christ's, then back into the very bosom of His Father 
where Christ is hid, there He will carry us. We, too, 
shall look out and be as calm and as independent as He is. 
The needs of men shall touch us just as keenly as they 
touch Him, but the sneers and strifes of men shall pass 
us by as they pass by Him and leave no mark on His 
unruffled life. It will be just as impossible when that 
time comes, for us to work ourselves into a passion 
about yesterday's gossip as it was for Jesus to become 
a partisan in the quarrel about the divided inheritance : 
and yet for us, just as for Him, this will not mean a cold 
and selfish separation from our brethren. We shall be 
infinitely closer to their real life when we separate our- 
selves from their outside strife and superficial pride, and 
know and love them truly by knowing and loving them 
in God." 

This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. In 
this world we must be exposed to the strife of tongues. 



THE REFUGE FROM TALK. 95 

It's arrows will drop over into the quietest and obscurest 
retreat which we make for ourselves. Its jargon will 
penetrate to our most retired chamber. We must hear 
what men say, and our very nature, the very nature of 
our life, makes us sensitive to that, and carries with it a 
temptation to shape our life by it. And yet, we are an- 
noyed by it ; we would be glad of a refuge from it. Our 
refuge is God. Our blessed Saviour, who knew and felt 
the strife of tongues as no other ever felt it, beckons us 
to Himself, and says, " Come hither with me into the 
hiding-place of God's presence. Hide your life with me in 
God." You who are worried by men's talk ; you who are 
tempted to respect it as a rule of living ; you who care 
so very, very much about what the world says, hear His 
voice. Give your minds to character and not to talk. 
Concentrate your effort and your thought upon being 
like Christ, and then the talk will wag on its own way 
and will not touch you as you walk the path which 
shineth more and more unto the perfect day. He shall 
hide you in the secret of His presence from the pride of 
man. He shall keep you secretly in a pavilion from the 
strife of tongues. 



VII. 

STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

" For when I am weak, then am I strong." — 2 Cor. 
xii. 10. 

Paul, as you perceive from the context, has been 
speaking of that great personal trial which he has de- 
scribed as " a thorn in the flesh." Speculations over the 
peculiar nature of this affliction have been to little pur- 
pose ; and this is just what we may expect from the 
Bible, which is a most tantalizing book to those who 
are concerned about the circumstances of truth rather 
than about the truth itself. Thus while curious students 
have been trying to show that Paul's thorn in the flesh 
was a pleurisy, or a weakness of the eyes, a headache or 
an earache, temptations to unbelief or to sensuality, tor- 
ments of conscience about his past life, epilepsy,— we 
are as much in the dark as ever upon these points : and 
that makes little or no difference, so long as the great 
spiritual lesson, God's strength in human weakness, is 
clear as the sun, and is charged with warning and 
comfort. 

Of this trial we know : 

That it was exceptionally severe. The apostle's 

metaphor would never have been selected to describe 

an ordinary affliction. The word " thorn " properly 
(96) 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. gy 

means the sharpened stake which was used in the bar- 
barous punishment of impaling, being driven by force 
through the living body. Again, it is described as the 
torment of Satan ; Satan's messenger sent to buffet 
him. When Satan is allowed to exercise his power upon 
men, we know what torments he applies, from the story 
of Job, and from our Lord's words to Peter, " Satan 
hath desired to sift you as wheat." 

We know that this infirmity hindered Paul's work, 
or seemed to him to hinder it. If it were a disease of 
the eyes, it compelled him to dictate instead of writing. 
If it were epilepsy, its spasms might seize him in the 
midst of some impassioned appeal to the Church, and 
make him an object of pity and disgust to those whom 
he was trying to instruct. Some have thought that this 
was in his mind when he wrote to the Galatians, " My 
temptation in the flesh ye despised not, neither rejected, 
but received me as an angel of God." There could be 
no sorer trial to him than one which seemed to interfere 
with his work ; for he was burdened with a sense of the 
value and of the danger of men's souls, and of the crit- 
ical condition of the infant Church. The love of Christ 
constrained him ; and the Gospel was as a fire in his 
bones which would not suffer him to be silent night 
or day. 

Hence he besought the Lord to remove this trial : 
earnestly, thrice entreating that it should depart from 
him. His request was refused. He was told that the 
thorn must remain for the present ; that he must be 
content to suffer, to feel the pain, to see himself humili- 
S 



98 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

ated, to see his work apparently suffer for the lack of his 
presence and counsel. 

But the refusal was qualified. Certain words were 
added which converted it from a hopeless finality into a 
revelation : which changed the messenger of Satan into 
a messenger of God. Whereas it might have seemed 
that God was frowning on his labors and impeding them, 
it now appeared that God was forwarding them by means 
of this very trial, and was giving him in it the highest 
testimony of His love. Whereas it might have appeared 
that God had chosen a weak and inefficient instrument 
to carry on His work, and that the work was going to 
be weak and inefficient for that reason, it now appears 
that through this very instrument, and by means of this 
fragmentary work, God is going to reveal His own per- 
fect strength. And the moment Paul gets hold of that 
view of the matter, he accepts it and rejoices in it ; for 
he forthwith says, " Most gladly therefore will I rather 
glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may 
rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, 
in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses 
for Christ's sake : for when I am weak, then am I 
strong." 

In considering this topic, you will observe : 
That God's answer to Paul's prayer lays down a 
general law. God does not merely promise to perfect 
Paul's strength in that particular weakness. Indeed He 
does not say, " My strength is made perfect in weak- 
ness," for the "my" is not in the text. He states the 
general truth, a truth not peculiar to the spiritual life, 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. gg 

though appearing there in its noblest aspect, that 
strength is perfected in weakness. 

Let us then look at this general law apart from its 
religious bearings. 

Strength is perfected in weakness. You know that 
the converse is true ; that weakness is perfected in 
strength ; for both your reading and your experience 
show you that the greatest manifestations of weakness 
are constantly seen in those whom the world deems the 
strongest. The weaknesses of great men form an ele- 
ment of literature. This is partly because their real 
strength betrays them into weakness. A strong man is 
likely to be a self-reliant man ; inclined to give very lit- 
tle heed to the counsels of others, and to insist on hav- 
ing his own way at all hazards : and such a man is mor- 
ally certain to display some weakness in himself or in 
his plans. A man, again, who is consciously strong at 
some point, is likely to think that his strength at that 
point will make up for his carelessness at other points. 
For instance, you often see men of great intellect who 
are morally weak and loose, and who count on their in- 
tellectual strength to cover their moral deficiency. The 
man who is financially strong is now and then tempted 
to believe that money can carry him over the lack of 
courtesy or consideration for others. Scripture history 
is not behind secular histoiy in the number and eminence 
of the testimonies to this truth. The strong men of the 
Bible are also its weak men. Abraham's falsehood, 
Noah's excess, Jacob's worldliness, Moses' unhallowed 
zeal, Elijah's faithless despair, David's lust and murder, 



(00 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

Solomon's luxuriousness and sensuality — all tell the 
same story which we read in the biographies of the 
scholars, statesmen, monarchs, and generals of later times. 
On the other hand, illustrations are equally abundant 
of strength perfected in weakness. They are all about 
us in our ordinary life. Let an ignorant but conceited 
man go to a foreign city. Strong in his own conceit, he 
says, " A guide is a nuisance, and I will have none of 
them. *I will find out the objects of interest for myself." 
He does not know a word of the language, he has not the 
faintest idea of the geography of the city, and he does not 
know how to use a map. And so he goes blundering 
along, trying to make inquiries by gestures ; getting into 
all sorts of places where he has no business to be ; ex- 
posing himself to insult and even to danger ; wasting 
hours in his search for a palace or an art-gallery — a sorry 
exhibition of weakness. Another man goes into the 
same city, quite as ignorant, but with a little more com- 
mon sense which leads him to say to himself, " I am 
helpless as a babe in this strange place : now let me pro- 
cure the right kind of help." He finds a trustworthy 
and intelligent guide. He goes with no loss of time to 
the places he wants to visit. He receives answers to all 
his questions and a great deal of information besides. 
He is happily gaining new ideas and solid knowledge, 
while the strong man, so independent of help, is stand- 
ing at street corners and painfully studying his guide- 
book. When they return home, the man who was weak 
enough to accept guidance, is the stronger man in knowl- 
edge. 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. IQ 1 

Can you imagine any object more weak and helpless 
than a blind child ? It is at the mercy of any cruelty 
which a bad heart may inspire. It is largely dependent 
on others for the commonest things ; and yet what a 
strength it wins from that very weakness. How much 
strength it draws to itself from others. The mother's 
love for that child has an element of peculiar tender- 
ness. Her heart goes out to that helpless little one as 
to no other member of the household. Over none does 
the father watch with such anxious care. Those sealed 
eyes, those tottering feet, those outstretched hands have 
a power to move those parents to labor and care and 
sacrifice such as the strongest and most beautiful of the 
household does not possess. Out of weakness the child 
is made strong. And then there is the familiar fact of 
the increased power imparted to certain faculties by the 
very infirmity of another faculty. Your touch is not 
half so sensitive and discerning as that of those groping 
hands. Your ear, though trained by the best masters in 
music or elocution, cannot detect the nice variations of 
sound which appeal to the ear of the blind. 

Then again, the consciousness of infirmity often makes 
its subject so cautious, and puts him under such careful 
discipline, that he really accomplishes more than another 
who is free from infirmity. The man whose health and 
strength are exuberant, is likely to be careless of them. 
A single leap or strain, made in the overflow of his ani- 
mal spirits, may maim or weaken him for life ; while, on 
the other hand, much of the world's best work is done 
by men who rarely know what it is to be without an 



102 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

aching head or a feverish pulse, and who therefore 
must needs work by rule and economize minutes 
and bring discipline to bear on rebellious nerves and 
muscles. It is this power of self-mastery wrought 
out through weakness, which gives them power over 
other minds and hearts. 

And now let us look at the truth on its religious side. 
There it comes into even stronger relief, because, in the 
Christian economy, weakness is assumed to be an univer- 
sal condition, and dependence is therefore the universal 
law of the Christian life. There, it is invariably true that 
real strength comes only out of that weakness which, 
distrustful of itself, gives itself up to God. There, it is 
invariably true that weakness grows out of the conceit 
which refuses to depend, and which trusts its own wis- 
dom or strength. There, it is invariably true that God's 
strength shines through human infirmity, and often se- 
lects for its best and richest expressions the poorest, 
weakest, most burdened of mankind. 

Let us take this very case of Paul. Here is a man be- 
set with various infirmities. He himself intimates that 
he lacked that imposing personal presence which carries 
so much weight with men. He had not the polished 
eloquence of Apollos. Besides, he labored under the 
disadvantages arising from the persistent malice and 
hatred of the Jews, who neglected no opportunity to 
blacken his reputation and to thwart his plans. There 
was his bodily ailment, aggravated by frequent journeys 
over stormy seas and roads beset with robbers and 
crossed by foaming torrents. There were incidents like 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 



103 



those at Philippi, scourgings, stocks, the hideous inner- 
prison with its darkness and stifling heat and poisonous 
air; like the stoning at Lystra, like the long confine- 
ments at Caesarea and Rome — all these, with the inces- 
sant care and anxiety for the churches. With all these, 
and others which might be added, Paul might well have 
called himself " weak," personally weak, and prosecuting 
his work against tremendous odds. And yet at this dis- 
tance, we can see that that very weakness of Paul was 
his strength. Understand me. I do not mean merely 
that Paul accomplished a great work in spite of his 
weakness. I mean that his weakness helped his work, 
and that it was distinctly an element of the power which 
to-day he wields in human thought. 

For Paul's weakness — conscious weakness — gave 
God's power its full opportunity. It is a strange 
gift that we have of preventing God from doing for 
us all that He would. Yet we have it nevertheless ; 
and those who are strongest in self-confidence and 
weakest in faith have most of it. But let that pass. 
Paul gave up his life, weakness and all, into God's hands, 
for God to use whatever in it He might see fit. And 
you know how often God sees fit to use in such cases 
the very elements you and I would throw away. We 
do not count weakness among the factors of success. 
The world is at a loss what to do with weakness. It 
has no use to which to put it, and no machinery with 
which to work it up. When God takes hold of weak- 
ness it becomes another thing and works under another 
law. So then Paul, having abandoned the idea of doing 



104 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

anything by himself, having given that poor, battered 
self to God without prescribing or choosing what part 
of it should be used or how it should be used, — -God 
took this weakness, the very thing which Paul had been 
asking might depart from him, and wrought out victory 
for Christ's cause and for Paul by means of it. You ask 
me, "How?" 

Well, take the impression which the character and 
history of Paul make on your own minds. You know 
something of the power which Luke's record of his life 
and labors exerts in stimulating Christian zeal and in 
educating character. Do not all these things get a 
stronger hold on your hearts, and through them upon 
your convictions, through the very sympathy which the 
apostle's sufferings call out ? 

Or take the same facts in his own day. Did not his 
very infirmities endear him to the churches ? Had not 
these somewhat to do with the liberal supplies from 
Philippi, and with the heart-breaking sorrow of the 
Ephesian elders at Miletus ? Can any one who has 
known the impressiveness of an admonition from a fee- 
ble or dying friend, doubt that the spectacle of Paul's 
emaciated frame and the knowledge that he bore in his 
body the marks of persecution for Christ's sake, added 
wonderfully to the power of his word ? 

And again, after all that we read of Paul, though next 
to Christ he is by far the most prominent figure in the 
New Testament, though we heartily admire the man as 
we read, yet we rise from his story and from his writings 
with a stronger impression of Christ than of Paul. The 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 



105 



radiance of the light eclipses the wonder of the lamp. 
That is as Paul would have had it ; and thus, as one of his 
modern expositors has truthfully said, " What the apos- 
tle lost for himself by his infirmities, and what Chris- 
tianity Jost for the moment, has been more than com- 
pensated by the acknowledgment that he was beyond 
doubt proved to be not the inventor of Christianity, but 
its devoted and humble propagator. In his own weak- 
ness lies the strength of the cause. When he was weak- 
est as a teacher of the present, he was strongest as an 
apostle of the future." 

Or go farther back to the immediate disciples of our 
Lord. Weak, fallible men we know them to have been, 
and yet there stands the record of their wonderful suc- 
cess as ministers of the Gospel. Christ called Peter a 
rock ; and yet at that stage of his history, Peter reminds 
us rather of those rocks which one meets with in clay- 
soil regions, which crumble at the touch, and are, least 
of all stones, fit for foundations. Peter, blustering, for- 
ward, boastful, with a great deal of strength of his own, 
which crumbled into weakness at the first touch of dan- 
ger, — and yet — " On this rock will I build my Church. 
So strong shall it be that the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it." 

The church which began under the ministry of weak 
Peter is surely no feeble factor in to-day's society : but 
the Peter of Pentecost was not the Peter of Gethsemane. 
Between these two he had learned a great deal about 
the weakness of human strength and the strength which 
God makes perfect in human weakness, The conse- 



106 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

quence is that whereas in Gethsemane Peter asserts 
himself, at Pentecost he asserts Jesus. Where he as- 
serts himself the issue is a coward and a traitor. Where 
he passes out of sight behind Jesus, he is the hero of the 
infant church, whom we love and honor. 

In this text there is no encouragement to cherish 
weakness. Weakness is not commended as a good 
thing in itself. The object of Christian training is to 
make men strong: and the Psalmist tells us that God's 
children go from strength to strength. But weakness is 
a universal fact in human nature. Our Lord covers all 
humanity with the statement, " the flesh is weak "; and 
this text does tell us to recognize the fact and to pro- 
vide against it by taking another's strength. The thing 
which it does commend is the permission of conscious 
weakness to have another's strength push up through 
itself and pervade and transform it ; a 

" holy strength whose ground 
Is in the heavenly land." 

That kind of strength does not encourage self-conceit. 
It does not lead a man to talk about his courage and 
resolution and energy. It rather hides the man behind 
his Lord. Paul can do all things, but only through 
Christ that strengtheneth him. How beautifully the 
context brings out this thought : " Most gladly will I 
rather glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ 
may rest upon me." Think of that for a moment. 
What was the ark of the covenant ? Nothing but a 
simple box overlaid with gold, such a thing as any skii- 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 



107 



ful workman could make. And yet, when it fell into 
the hands of Israel's enemies, the priest declared " the 
glory is departed from Israel." What gave it this im- 
portance and meaning? It was that which rested upon 
it. It was the glory which burned between the cheru- 
bim, which made its resting-place the holiest spot in the 
world. And so, when the power of Christ rests upon a 
life, all its commonplace, its littleness, its weakness, are 
transfigured and lifted up into power, and the weak 
things of the world confound the things which are 
mighty. Thus it comes to pass that out of the mouth 
of babes and sucklings God ordains strength. You have 
sometimes skirted a ridge of mountains, bold, rugged 
masses, not regular in outline, but with jagged pinnacles 
splintered by the lightning, cleft down to their bases 
here and there by some convulsion of primeval times, 
yet showing through these fearful rifts glimpses of 
woody valleys and descending waterfalls and peaceful 
homes. How much grander they are than the smooth- 
ly-rounded, forest-clad hills. So it is with God's strong 
men. " God," says some one, " often accomplishes His 
greatest works by ministers who, great in themselves, are 
all the greater because their greatness is cleft through 
with infirmities through which we see the divine power 
working within them." 

However exceptional, therefore, Paul's trial may have 
been, this word with which Christ consoles him is for 
us no less than for him. 

It commends to us the old truth, asserted by our 
Lord, confirmed by the histories of the strongest and 



108 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

best of all ages, daily commended to us by our own falls 
and mistakes — the flesh is weak. 

It brings to us the same comfort that Paul received, 
that this weakness, so discouraging, so humiliating, so 
irritating, may be the very point where divine strength 
shall assert itself in victory. The truth of the text is 
wider than some of us have been wont to think. We 
have possibly imagined that it conveyed no more than 
the assurance that God would assist our weakness ; 
would lift us when we should have fallen, and would 
prevent us from falling victims to strong enemies. But 
God means more than that. The text asserts not only 
that, but also the grander truth that God will make 
weakness itself an element of strength. That He will 
develop positive power out of it. We are, naturally, 
like one who carries round with him a rough precious- 
stone, ignorant of its value, and ready to throw it away 
or to part with it for a trifle. This thing, weakness, we 
do not know what to do with. It is rough. It is heavy. 
We should be glad to throw it away. Christ comes like 
a skilful lapidary and shows us its value. He refuses to 
take it away, because He can teach us to convert it into 
power which shall enrich us and the world. I remember 
a little church among the mountains, which sprang up 
through the labors of a man the best of whose life was 
spent in trouble — a church founded among a popula- 
tion little better than heathen ; and in the church 
building there was framed and hung up a magnifi- 
cent rough agate which he had picked up somewhere 
among the hills, with the inscription, " And such were 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. I09 

some of you." And that stone tells the story of our 
text — the story of the Church on earth ; a weak, erring 
church, formed of men of like passions with ourselves, 
its leaders stained and scarred with human infirmity, 
yet with a line of victory and spiritual power running 
through it like a track of fire : rough stones hewn out of 
the mountains, carved into polished pillars in the temple 
of the Lord : brands from the burning, commissioned to 
be priests with fair mitres and tongues touched with the 
convincing power of the Holy Ghost: ignorant, fallible 
men and women, persecuted, afflicted, tormented, de- 
spised — waxing valiant in fight, turning to flight alien 
armies, out of weakness made strong. 

But this truth is not for the heroic side of life only. 
We want it most on the side which is not heroic (as 
men use that term); in that sphere of daily, common- 
place life where our weakness is most apparent and most 
tested. And it belongs there. It will come to our help 
there. 

We are weak. Let us accept the fact in all its length 
and breadth ; but as that fact grows upon us let us fix 
our eyes on the other fact of God's strength. Let us re- 
tire from our own strength only to lay hold on God's. 
If we do, then our weakness will be a revelation. It will 
show us more of God. I have often seen in the woods 
how a storm had torn away the soil from around a tree 
on the edge of a bank, and in so doing had laid bare 
the underground history of the tree. I could see the 
roots, and how deeply they had struck, and how they had 
wrapped themselves round the rocks ; and so the weak- 



110 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

ness which gives the tempests of this life their opportu- 
nity, the weakness which so often results in stripping a 
life of its earthly hopes and pleasures, the weakness 
which lays one open to remark and sneer and contempt, 
may yet show the roots of holy character striking deep 
into the life of God, and holding the life fast to Eternity. 
It will bring blessed comfort when once we shall have 
been persuaded to take God's strength for our own : 

— " to confess 
That there's but one retreat : 
And meekly lay each need and each distress 
Down at the Sovereign feet. 

" Then, then, it fills the place 
Of all we hoped to do ; 
And sunken nature triumphs in the grace 
That bears us up and through. 

" A better glow than health 

Flushes the cheek and brow, 
The heart is stout with store of nameless wealth : 
We can do all things now. 

" No less sufficience seek ; 
All counsel less is wrong ; 
The whole world's force is poor, and mean, and weak ; 
When I am weak, I'm strong." 



VIII. 

BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 

" And He said, So is the Kingdom of God, as if a 
man should cast seed upon the earth ; and should 
sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should 
spring up and grow, he knoweth not how. The 
earth beareth fruit of herself ; first the blade, 
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. But 
when the fruit is ripe, straightway he putteth 
forth the sickle, because the harvest is co?ne." — 
Mark iv. 26-29. 

WHAT does Christ mean when He says, " The King- 
dom of God is like" this or that? Let us be sure that 
He is not using a mere rhetorical figure, a superficial 
comparison which will not bear pressing. We may 
press these similitudes of our Lord. When He says a 
thing is like, He means a real, inner likeness. He 
means that a fact in the illustration, answers to a fact in 
the thing illustrated. In these parables, therefore, in 
which He expounds the nature and growth and potency 
of the kingdom of God, we may count upon finding the 
substantial counterpart of the natural fact in the spir- 
itual fact. The kingdom or rule of God in the world 
and in the individual man, obeys certain laws and de- 
velops certain phenomena. The same laws and the 
same phenomena hold in the growth of a mustard-seed ; 

in the work of leaven in bread ; in the growth of tares 

(in) 



112 BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 

among wheat ; in whatever natural process, in short, 
may be selected to illustrate the particular aspect of the 
kingdom. 

This fact will give us, as it is intended to give, great 
assurance and comfort and certainty in the practical ap- 
plication of these parables. Let us look at the one be- 
fore us. 

A farmer, an ordinary, average laborer, sows seed, of 
wheat let us say. He scatters it and covers it from 
sight in the ground. Between the sowing and the har- 
vest a long time intervenes. For a good while nothing 
appears. The ground to-day looks just as it did yester- 
day. No stranger could tell from looking at the field 
that anything was sown there. What is the farmer's 
feeling and attitude during that time? The point of 
the parable is in the answer to that question. He is 
not nervous or worried or uneasy. So far as the seed is 
concerned, he is obliged to be idle. Nothing that he 
can do can hasten its growth. There is nothing for 
him to do but to let the seed lie where he threw it. 
So he goes on quietly with his regular routine of life. 
The condition of that sown field does not keep him 
awake at night. He sleeps, and he rises the next day, 
and sees the field as black and smooth as it was the day 
before, but he is no more troubled at that than he was 
overnight. He wakes and rises and goes about other 
business or does nothing, as the case may be. 

By and by the little green shoots appear above the 
surface ; not full heads of wheat, only slender blades. 
It makes no difference to him. Still he goes to rest at 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 113 

the appointed time, and sleeps his sleep, and rises, and 
possibly throws his eye over the field, but he is perfectly 
at his ease. He does not get out his sickles or call his 
men. 

Meanwhile the blade is slowly developing into a stalk 
with the hard, crude, green wheat-ears. Still he makes 
no sign. Still the accustomed routine goes on. He 
sleeps and rises night and day, and shows no anxiety 
about that field. 

At last the wheat is ripe. Then, of a sudden, the 
farmer's whole interest and attention concentrate them- 
selves on that field. "Ho! reapers! Harvest-time is 
here ! The wheat is ready to cut ! Out into the fields ! 
Out with your sickles ! Bestir yourselves while the day 
is young; while the sky is clear; ere the rain come! 
Gather the wheat into the barns ! " 

Why has the farmer been so quiet and untroubled 
and even idle all this time? Not from indifference sure- 
ly. You see how all his energy leaps into action the 
moment the field is ripe unto the harvest. It is from 
simple knowledge of a law of nature, and simple faith in 
the operation of that law. It is not scientific knowl- 
edge. A plain countryman, he knows nothing of the 
philosophy of germination. The seed springs up and 
grows " how, knoweth not he." But he knows that the 
earth beareth fruit of herself. Given the seed, he knows 
that the soil will do its part, and bring the seed on to har- 
vest. Further, he knows that this process is a slow one, 
and is carried on by stages : that the full corn does not di- 
rectly follow the blade, nor the ear the sowing: but that 



H4 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 



the process is invariable, first the blade, then the ear, 
then, and only then, the full corn in the ear. He trusts 
nature. He neither frets nor bustles during the interval 
between sowing and harvest. If he could hasten the 
growth, his indifference would vanish ; but he cannot, 
and the impossibility does not disturb him. What 
seems indifference, therefore, is merely the recognition 
and acceptance of the fact that growth obeys a law en- 
tirely beyond his control. 

Our Lord, you remember, touched the same truth as 
applied to human growth. "Which of you, by being 
anxious, can add unto his stature * one cubit?" It is 
folly for the boy to try and grow. He will not grow 
any faster by fretting for twenty years. He just moves 
on through happy, careless boyhood, and plays and 
studies, eats and sleeps, and his growth takes care of 
itself and perfects itself in due time. Again our Lord 
applies the same truth to the flowers. " Consider the 
lilies, how they grow. They toil not." 

So then, this parable gives us three facts attaching to 
a process of nature. 1st. The earth bringeth forth fruit 
by itself, by its own natural law. Growth develops out 
of the contact of the earth and the seed. 2d. This pro- 
cess is slow and gradual. 3d. The proper attitude of 
man toward this process is that of patient, quiet, cheer- 
ful waiting. 

Our Lord says the Kingdom of God is like this. 
Therefore in studying the growth of the divine life and 

* Or " age." 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 115 

the progress of the divine rule either in a single soul or 
in society, we may expect to find three facts correspond- 
ing to the three in nature : namely, that divine life has 
a power of self-development according to a law of its 
own : that the development is slow and gradual : that the 
soul's true attitude toward this development is restful, 
cheerful, patient waiting. 

I shall not dwell at length on the first two points. 
We do not need to argue that the seed of the divine life 
has a power of self-development ; and that God's life in 
contact with the human heart will bring forth fruit of it- 
self. Christ indeed tells us in the parable of the sower 
that the seed falls into different kinds of soil, and that 
the character of the growth is determined by that fact. 
But that is'not the point here. Here the favorable con- 
ditions are assumed — good seed in an honest heart. 
That being the case, the seed will spring up and fructify. 

Moreover, the fact that this process is slow and gradual 
needs no proof. We see for ourselves that moral and 
spiritual growth is not perfected in one stage, any more 
than physical growth. Spiritual infancy and childhood 
precede spiritual manhood, just as one is a babe and a 
child before he becomes a man. Saints are not made at 
a stroke. They do not spring up like Jonah's gourd in 
a night. No one of the successive stages is overleaped. 
Conditions may accelerate growth in special cases, but 
the growth none the less rises through all the successive 
planes. Moreover, the best growths take the longest 
time. A Madeira vine will cover a large arbor in a sin- 
gle season. An oak is a matter of a century. A dog is 



Il6 BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 

full-grown in a couple of years. A man is not at his 
best in twenty. 

Let us then pass to the third point : the proper atti- 
tude of a Christian toward the growth of the divine life 
in himself and in society. 

No problem is oftener submitted to a pastor than the 
conscious imperfection of sincere believers. They come, 
saying, " I do not see that I am growing at all in the 
Christian life. I find so much evil in myself. I am so 
skeptical. My life is marked by so many lapses and 
stumbles. I find myself so cold and irresponsive, and 
therefore I fear that I have no divine life in me." 

Now it is to such that Christ addresses this parable. 
He points them to the farmer, sleeping and rising night 
and day while his sown field lies black and unmarked by 
a single sign of growth, or while the wheat-ears are hard 
and green. 

Let us emphasize the fact that our Lord is not en- 
couraging indifference to spiritual progress. His illus- 
tration is as far as possible from any hint of that. The 
farmer is not indifferent to the growth of his wheat, but 
his attitude toward it is determined by the fact that, so 
far as the fact and rate of growth are concerned, nature 
has taken it into her own hands. It has passed into the 
sphere of the law that the earth bringeth forth fruit of 
itself. His apparent indifference, as has been truthfully 
said, " is not real apathy. It is latent energy biding its 
time ; fervent desire controlled by the patience of hope." 

And we are encouraged to take just this attitude to- 
ward our own spiritual growth. A Christian life indeed 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 



117 



gives us something to do and to watch over at all times. 
It never allows us to be idle or uninterested ; but, as re- 
gards this particular matter of the progress and rate of 
growth, we must recognize the fact that it belongs to a 
region and works under a law that is largely beyond 
our reach. The unconscious assumption which under- 
lies much of our restlessness and anxiety about this 
matter, is that we have to do the work of growing ; 
that we must make ourselves grow. And we keep our 
eye on the harvest-stage, and think only of that, and 
make ourselves miserable because we have not reached 
it. We carry into the time of the blade and the ear the 
bustle and haste of harvest-time, and to no purpose 
whatever. During all that intermediate period between 
seed-time and harvest, the farmer is not idle. He must 
keep away the birds from the field. He must look to 
his fences. There is work of various kinds to be done 
in other parts of the farm ; but still there is a work go- 
ing on in that field which he cannot do, and of the 
nature of which he knows little or nothing. So, what- 
ever we may have to do day by day, as we are growing 
up into Christ, there is a certain work which must be 
done for us, independently of us, a work which will obey 
its own law and advance at its own rate and by its own 
stages. 

Accepting this fact, we then come face to face with 
the accompanying fact that this law includes, besides 
the harvest-stage, the two other stages of the blade and 
the green ear. The core of the question is, How are we 
to stand affected toward these two stages ? 



Il8 BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 

For these have their counterpart in Christian expe- 
rience. There is the blade-stage : or, as the correspond- 
ing point of a tree's growth, the blossoming-stage. How 
beautiful it is. How tender the blade. How fresh its 
living green. How delicate and exquisitely-tinted the 
petals of the blossom. Or carry the illustration up to 
human life. How unsullied and sweet are infancy and 
early childhood. How quick the perceptions. How 
natural the attitudes. How responsive to joy and pain. 
How bright and quaint the sayings. And similarly 
there is a peculiar charm about the first stages of Chris- 
tian life as it emerges into the sunlight and atmosphere 
of Christ's love. The spiritual susceptibilities are so 
quick ; the enthusiasm so ardent ; the whole being so 
responsive to the breath of devotion ; the will so ready ; 
the flavor of love and holy joy so pronounced. 

In nature, with all the peculiar charm of this initial 
stage, its transitoriness presents no difficulty or doubt 
to our minds. We do not dream of regarding its beauty 
and sweetness as a warrant for its permanency. We are 
not surprised nor dismayed when the tender blade gives 
place to the lank, unlovely stalk ; when the delicate 
blossom is borne down the wind, and replaced by the 
hard, green ball ; when the winsome babe passes into 
the rude, romping boy or girl. We do not lose hope of 
grain or fruit or manhood because the earlier delicacy 
and beauty are merged in a succeeding stage where 
crudeness is emphasized. But that is just what we do, 
or are prone to do, when spiritual growth is in question. 
The fact is the same. The second, middle stage of 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 



II 9 



Christian development is less lovely than the first. The 
life has come out into the atmosphere of conflict. The 
babe in Christ has begun to work out the problem of 
Christian manhood. The fight with temptation is on. 
Passion asserts itself. The life is launched upon the 
current of business and society. A larger and more 
captivating view of the world is opened. The mind has 
come up against the great problems of religious thought, 
and is learning to doubt and to question. The tender, sub- 
tle charm of the first stage has run into something hard- 
er, sharper, with more earth-stains, more marks of strug- 
gle, less rapture and brightness and warmth, less spiritual 
responsiveness, — just that stage of which I spoke a few 
moments ago, which sincere souls contemplate with dis- 
may. I am speaking of facts — facts which most of you 
will recognize in your own experience : unpleasant in- 
deed, but just as real as the hard, green ear or the crude, 
sour apple. And because many good people refuse to 
recognize this second, intermediate stage as a fact of 
spiritual development no less than of nature, they are 
frightened and restless, and disposed to believe that this 
stage is a violation of the law of growth in Christ. In 
other words, in nature we recognize in this hard, green 
stage a sign of growth. In religion we assume a contra- 
diction of nature, and take the crude stage as a sign of 
deterioration, or of arrested growth. 

But let us look farther. All through this crude stage, 
nature is steadily and quietly carrying out her law. The 
farmer knows that and is easy about it. The wind blows 
and the rain beats upon the stalk and its half-ripened 



120 BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST, 

ears. The mould stains it. The tempest tosses the 
bough with its load of raw, green apples or pears. But 
the growth is going on. A tinge of rich yellow is creep- 
ing upon the ear ; a blush is stealing over the surface of 
the fruit ; a dash of sweetness, a suggestion of flavor, are 
toning down the sourness. So the boy begins to show 
the lines of manhood in his face, and a hint of ripeness 
asserts itself in his speech and bearing. All these are 
familiar enough to us, but when we look at spiritual de- 
velopment we shut our eyes obstinately to any hint of 
riper color or flavor. We are intent only on the hard- 
ness and greenness. We will not see that growth may 
be going on and ripeness coming through crudeness ; 
nay, that crudeness is included in growth, and is the 
prophecy of ripeness. We get no comfort out of a 
whole long period of our Christian growth, because we 
insist to ourselves that there is something abnormal and 
wrong in our not being ripe and ready for harvest. 

And this is all wrong. God surely never meant 
that a stage of Christian development which covers a 
great part of our active life should be marked by perpet- 
ual uneasiness and despondency and worry. Those first 
disciples of Christ were far from being spiritually ripened, 
but Christ said to them, " Peace I leave with you ; my 
peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled. 
In the world ye shall have tribulation, but in me ye shall 
have peace." He gives us substantially the same lesson 
in this parable by pointing us to the farmer during the 
long interval between seed-time and harvest. It is no 
part of the parable that a man in Christ's kingdom 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. I2 i 

should be carelessly happy all his days. Christian life 
develops in the face of the world, the flesh, and the devil, 
and must and will feel the shocks of these. The fruit 
and the wheat have to meet the wind and the rain. But 
our mistake is that we do not apprehend the real point 
of the struggle. Our difficulty, at the core, is, that we 
regard the condition which necessitates our struggle 
with sin as something wrong and abnormal. We quarrel 
with the fact of spiritual crudeness. We worry and tor- 
ment ourselves because we are in the green ear and the 
hard bud ; and thus we fight with a fact which is entirely 
out of our control, a fact which is as really of God's or- 
dering as was the creation of the world ; a law of slow 
growth through stages of crudeness, which holds as abso- 
lutely in the spiritual as in the natural world : a law 
which includes crudeness as it does ripeness. Paul saw 
it thus. He accepted spiritual immaturity, with all its 
consequences of wrestling and striving, as facts which he 
was not called upon to challenge. " Not as though I had 
already attained. I follow after, that I may grasp. I 
press toward the goal." But equally, Paul was conscious 
that spiritual growth and progress involved something 
beyond his strivings and labors ; that something had to 
be done in him and for him ; that there was a power 
not his own, which, in its own way and at its own rate, 
was ripening his Christian manhood through this imma- 
ture stage ; and he settled down in quiet faith upon 
that, saying, " If God be for us, who can be against us? 
I am confident that He who hath begun a good work in 
you will perfect it." 



122 BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 

And the same truth holds in our estimate of others. 
When shall we learn that great truth of the promise 
and prophecy of incompleteness, which runs from the 
lowest point in nature through all human history ? 
Why do we judge men only in the light of the actual, 
and take no account of the possibilities enfolded in their 
very immaturity and spiritual crudeness ? Why do we 
refuse the teaching of nature that crudeness now means 
ripeness by and by ? Why are we contented and hope- 
ful over the fact of the green ear and the hard bud in 
nature, and fretful and impatient and hopeless over the 
green ear and the hard bud in God's children ? Why, 
look at Christ's attitude toward that fact. Take the 
familiar case of Peter, who is a fair representative of the 
green-ear stage in the development of the early disciples. 
Our Lord knew better than any one else Peter's pas- 
sionateness, his conceit, cowardice, roughness, dulness of 
spiritual perception. And yet all the while He saw ripe- 
ness and fruitfulness in him. He saw that Satan was go- 
ing to sift him, but equally that Peter would strengthen 
his brethren. He saw in him the shifting sand, but also 
the rock of the Church. And our Lord knew that the 
law of the divine seed in him would assert itself and 
work itself out. Peter was in the hard-ear stage, but 
Christ did not despair of the full-corn in the ear ; and 
He did not fret or worry or grow impatient with Peter. 
He was patient, loving, forbearing, not disturbed because 
He did not see in Gethsemane or in the high-priest's 
court what the multitude at Pentecost saw. The ripe- 
ness of the full corn was coming. It did come, as we 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 



123 



know. Shall we quarrel with spiritual immaturity in 
our brethren ? Shall we write down as not Christ's the 
man who develops sharp edges, obstinacy, conceit, irri- 
tability — in whom we mourn the lack of breadth, the 
limitation of charity ? Paul teaches us a different lesson. 
" Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are 
spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, 
considering yourselves. Bear ye one another's burdens 
and so fulfil the law of Christ." Our children, our Sab- 
bath-school pupils, especially those who have professed 
faith in Christ — do not let us expect too much. Let us 
recognize the green ear as a part of God's own growth. 
Let us not be surprised nor disheartened at wayward- 
ness ; let us not grow faint-hearted because precept and 
admonition seem to leave no abiding impression. The 
gardener must water and prune and brace up the young 
tree, it is true, but after all, the power of growth does 
not lie in the watering and bracing. We are often 
tempted to leave out of sight the largest factor in the 
process of spiritual growth — the inherent, self-develop- 
ing power of the divine seed. We reason as if the 
whole work were of man. Let us not forget that God 
is at work in immaturity as well as in ripeness. 

And for ourselves, let us only do our daily work and 
meet our daily foes with a quiet and resolved heart, and 
leave the growing to God, and the ripeness will come in 
time. Christian ripeness is a fact and not merely a hope. 
We do know that men grow through that immature stage, 
and come to take on again all that was best and SAveetest 
in the first bloom of Christian life, together with a great 



124 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. 



deal more which could not, from the very nature of the 
case, be in that earlier stage. There is joy, but it is 
deep and tranquil rather than passionate. There is con- 
scientiousness, but not petty scrupulousness. There is 
settled conviction about a few things, but quietness 
about things which cannot be settled. There is less 
thought of self and more of others. Self-scrutiny is 
swallowed up in the contemplation of the world's needs. 
There is humility about the matter of spiritual attain- 
ment. From the ripe Christian you do not hear talk of 
" Christian perfection." That belongs to the crude stage. 
The key-note is rather " I count not myself to have ap- 
prehended, but I follow after." There has dawned upon 
such an one so large a view of the possibilities which are 
in Christ and in Christian manhood through Christ, 
that he has come to look for completeness in heaven 
alone. 

And withal, the life is lived in a tranquil atmosphere. 
You remember that beautiful passage in the Pilgrim's 
Progress, how, after the Slough of Despond and the 
Valley of the Shadow, and Apollyon, and the Giant De- 
spair, and the Hill Difficulty had all been passed, — the 
pilgrims entered into the country of Beulah, whose air 
was very sweet and pleasant. " In this country the sun 
shineth night and day ; wherefore this was beyond the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of the reach 
of Giant Despair, neither could they from this place so 
much as see Doubting Castle. Here they were within 
sight of the city they were going to, also here met them 
some ,of the inhabitants thereof ; for in this land the 



BETWEEN SOWING AND HARVEST. j 2 $ 

shining ones commonly walked, because it was upon the 
borders of heaven. Here they heard voices from out the 
city, loud voices saying, 'Say ye to the daughter of 
Zion, Behold thy Salvation cometh, behold His reward 
is with him.' " 



IX. 

THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 

" For this God is our God forever and ever. He will 
be our Guide even unto death." — Psalm xlviii. 14. 

It was an old Athenian custom to celebrate at the 
public expense the funeral of those citizens who had 
honorably fallen in war. At the close of the first year 
of the war between Athens and Sparta, Pericles was 
chosen to deliver the funeral oration. His eloquent 
words have been preserved for us in the pages of a 
Greek historian. He calls upon his fellow-citizens to 
fix their eyes on the present greatness of their city, and 
he continues: "When you are impressed by the specta- 
cle of her glory, reflect that this Empire has been ac- 
quired by men who knew their duty, and had the cour- 
age to do it. The sacrifice which they made was repaid 
to them : for they received, each one for himself, a praise 
which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchres. 
For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men : 
not only are they commemorated by columns and in- 
scriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands 
there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven 
not on stone, but in the hearts of men. Make them 
your examples. Congratulate yourselves that you have 

been happy during the greater part of your days ; re- 
(126) 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 



127 



member that your life of sorrow will not last long, and 
be comforted by the glory of those who are gone : for 
the love of honor alone is ever young, and not riches but 
honor is the delight of men when they are old and use- 
ess. 

How striking is the contrast of this utterance with the 
Psalm which we are to consider this morning ! This too 
has a national character. It is supposed that it was sung 
to commemorate the deliverance of Jerusalem from the 
Assyrians. It records the defeat of the enemy, and like 
the speech of the Athenian, points to the unimpaired 
glory of the national centre. The kings marched by to- 
gether. They looked upon Jerusalem, and were troubled. 
Fear took hold upon them, and they hasted away, broken 
and scattered like the great merchant-ships of Tarshish 
by the east wind. Zion stands unharmed. No hostile 
army lies at her gates. Behold her in her beauty ! Let 
the daughters of Judah rejoice ! Compass Zion, and go 
round about her : tell her towers, mark well her bul- 
warks, consider her palaces ! But here the contrast ap- 
pears. Israel's chief cause of congratulation is not in 
the bravery and well-earned honor of her captains and 
soldiers and counsellors ; not in the enterprise and artis- 
tic skill which have founded and maintained the city. 
The true key-note is struck in the very first words of the 
Psalm : " Great is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised. 
God is known in her palaces for a refuge. It is He who 
sends forth His east wind and scatters the ships of Tar- 
shish, that has dispersed the Assyrian host. The city is 
Jehovah's. God will establish it. We have thought of 



128 THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 

Thy loving-kindness, God, in the midst of Thy tem- 
ple. As is Thy name, so is Thy praise to the ends of 
the earth. Let the daughters of Judah rejoice because 
of Thy judgments. Our future is in Thy hands. This 
God is our God forever and ever. He will be our Guide 
even unto death." 

The contrast is instructive. There can be no question 
as to which member of it appeals to us. Our stand-point 
of reminiscence and of hope is the Hebrew and not the 
Greek one. Whether we consider our national or our 
individual life, we recognize God as the Author of all 
prosperity and the ground , of all hope, and not great 
generals or statesmen or scholars. If we have cause for 
congratulation, the cause is Jehovah ; if we have cheer- 
ful anticipations, they are grounded in the assurance of 
His care and guidance. 

Naturally, at such seasons as this,* our thought runs 
into forecast. The character of that forecast is largely 
imparted by the past ; and therefore it would not be 
strange if our anticipations and predictions of the future 
should be mingled with grave doubts and anxious fore- 
bodings. Many of us- have lived long enough to have 
become skeptical of human wisdom and power in the 
conduct of affairs. Most of us who have reached middle 
life have learned by experience to distrust our own wis- 
dom in the conduct of our own life ; and our own blun- 
ders and disasters, and the magnitude and complexity of 
the problems which have emerged in the past, and which 



* New Year, 1887. 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. I2 g 

cast their deep shadow into the future, tend to make us 
fearful and distrustful about the possibilities of the com- 
ing years. Our text to-day fits into this anxiety. The 
Psalm gives us our true stand-point of thought as Chris- 
tians. We delight to trace God in history ; let us make 
Him the central and controlling element of the future. 
" This God is our God forever and ever. He will be out 
Guide even unto death." 

I say that the text fits into our anxiety, both for our- 
selves and for our nation : for guidance is our represent- 
ative need. What is our true policy for the right con- 
duct of our own future? Who is to solve for us the 
hard personal questions which are coming to the front ? 
Are we to succeed or fail ? If to succeed, how ? Who 
is to guide- us safely and successfully through the vexa- 
tious political and social questions which are already 
upon us ? To these queries the Psalm makes answer : 
We need a Guide ; we have one. This God will be oui 
Guide even unto death. 

Let us take the text in its own order. 

The Psalmist makes the past throw light on the fu- 
ture. He reviews a crisis in national history, and shows 
how God has led the nation triumphantly through it. 
He has interposed with His strong right hand, and has 
dispersed and broken the enemy when he was at their 
very gates ; and it is upon God's characteristics as ex- 
hibited in this crisis that he bases his assurances for the 
future. Such is God — so mighty, and so careful for His 
people. Our God, who has made our cause His own ; 

forever, for He is always the same ; as He has shown 
6* 



130 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 



himself our guide, so will He be our guide even unto 
death. 

And certainly, if the Psalmist had been the most 
learned of historians, if he could have anticipated the 
large and minute knowledge and the elaborate philoso- 
phies of history which mark the present, he could not 
have reached a wiser conclusion. For if, in our studies, 
we leave God out of history or of personal experience, 
these give us no ground of hope for successful guidance 
in the future. If any one is satisfied to believe that he 
has reached his present success, or that the world has 
attained its present point of progress through human 
wisdom alone, I wish him joy of his conclusion, and 
should be interested to know how he reconciles it with 
the facts. For history is largely a record of human 
blunders, whether it be the history of the world or of 
the Church ; and the results of our own unaided wisdom 
in the evolution of our individual lives, are, I think, 
such as we should not care to have written out in full. 
The administration of the world has clearly proved it- 
self to be altogether too large a thing for either the 
individual or the collective wisdom of mankind. If any 
one chooses to believe that humanity has stumbled and 
gioped its way at haphazard up to its present attain- 
ment, I can only say his credulity is phenomenal. If, 
on the other hand, he recognizes in that development 
some element of superintendence and guidance, he can- 
not find it in the counsels or in the deeds of men. 
History without God, in short, is undecipherable ; and 
the Psalmist, as it seems to me, reached the only satis- 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. I3I 

factory, indeed the only possible solution, when he said, 
" Such is God, our God forever and ever." 

We go into this new year then with God as our guide, 
if we go into it rightly. And the next words of the 
text carry with them a great power of assurance. Our 
God. We carry God into the new year not merely as an 
abstract fact, not merely as a recognized possibility of 
power and wisdom, but as a personal possession. This 
God is our God. This permission to appropriate God is 
one of the most precious revelations of Scripture. 
Wonderful as it may seem, God gives Himself to us. 
We talk of God's giving Himself in Christ as if that 
were some new gift. God had given Himself to men 
long before Christ came. Long before Jesus told men 
to pray " Our Father," the Psalmist had said, " O God, 
Thou art my God." That little word " my" represents 
the eternal relation of God to His people ; and if God is 
ours, then whatever in God is available for us, is ours. 
Not only so. We like to come into proved possessions. 
We like to wield the instrument which has proved 
potent in another's hand. We like to inherit the land 
which has proved its fruitfulness ; and this desire is met 
by the word " such," which is the literal rendering for 
"this "God. Such is God — our God. He is our ancestral 
possession. He was our fathers' God. However mighty 
He has shown Himself in saving men, however wise in 
guiding, however generous in giving, however merciful 
in pardoning — such is God, our God : such to us as He 
was to them : the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 
No man who can truthfully say my God, goes into this 



132 THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 

year poor, or helpless, or with a doubtful future. Un- 
certain indeed it may be as to details, but not as to 
quality. The modes and forms of the future we cannot 
know nor guess, but they will surely cover nothing but 
good, whatever they may be. A good many of you do 
not practically believe that. If you did, you would not 
worry and fret as you do. I tell you this to-day, and I 
give you God's Word for it, and yet if the Holy Spirit do 
not make this truth real to you, you will go home and cut 
down the truth to the measure of what you see. You 
will not accept God's large meaning. If a rich and wise 
man in whom you have perfect trust should come to 
you this morning and say, " For the rest of your life 
you shall absolutely command my purse, my knowledge, 
my experience," you would appreciate that, and would 
believe it, and would get substantial help and comfort 
from it. And yet God says to you nothing less than 
this. I am your God. All that you can receive as a 
man, I put at your disposal. That is your new-year's 
gift if you will believe it. God does not indeed promise 
to give you everything you may desire. That would be 
to make His gift null and void. He gives you Himself, 
and in accepting that gift, you take not only God's gifts, 
but the wisdom which selects and regulates them. Some 
things God will not give you because they would hurt 
you. Other things He will not give you because you 
could not use them if you had them. In giving you 
Himself God gives you more than all His gifts com- 
bined. 

But let us go on with the Psalmist. This possession 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. I33 

of God is not for a limited time merely. Such is God, 
our God, forever and ever. More than this year's future 
is assured. The Psalmist elsewhere calls God the God 
of his life, and says, " I have set the Lord always before 
my face." You can say to-day what the king, the capi- 
talist, the man of renown cannot say of his possessions. 
The king cannot say of his crown, " This is mine forever." 
The head that wears the crown must be laid low ; the 
rich man's gold and bonds must pass into other hands, 
and the fame of the famous must fade away. But this 
God is our God forever and ever— with us alway, even 
unto the end of the world. 

This thought is further developed in the second 
clause of the text, which brings us back to its key-note 
— guidance. We have been speaking of God generally 
as our possession : this general thought is now made 
specific by the word "guide": God is our God as our 
guide. 

This idea of guidance is often attached to God in 
Scripture. It was symbolized in the pillar of cloud and 
of fire in which God manifested Himself as the leader of 
the host of Israel. When the angel of Jehovah ap- 
peared to Joshua, he said, " As captain of the Lord's 
host am I come." Moses said to the children of Israel, 
" The Lord will go over Jordan before thee." And in his 
review of the people's history, he said, " He found him 
in a desert land, and in a waste howling wilderness. He 
led him about." David says, " He leadeth me into green 
pastures "; Isaiah, " The Lord shall guide thee continu- 
ally." And Jesus takes up the same thought in His 



134 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 



beautiful figure of the good shepherd. " When he put- 
teth forth his sheep, he goeth before them." Nay, the 
thought is not dropped from the imagery by which 
heaven is pictured : for the " Lamb which is in the 
midst of the throne shall shepherd them, and shall lead 
them to living fountains of waters." 

Such is God, our God, our guide, an approved guide. 
The history of His guidance, the map of the tracks by 
which He has led His people, is before us. We can 
study it for ourselves, and can convince ourselves that 
God has made no mistakes ; that He has never yet led 
any soul of man astray. The map of men's courses 
through life is indeed a confused one ; but the confusion 
is made by men's wandering feet, by men's divergences 
from God's lines. The first instance has yet to be shown 
of one who has fared other than well by following God 
as a guide. Do you cite me the great army of the sor- 
rowing, the persecuted, the martyrs ? They have not 
fared ill if their own testimony is worth anything. They 
have had their choice. They could have forsaken God 
if they would, but they chose to follow Him through 
suffering to death. On their own testimony they fared 
better with God and with tribulation, than with the 
world and without God. 

This thought of guidance is taken up again in the 
seventy-third Psalm, and expanded. " Nevertheless I 
am continually with thee. Thou hast holden me by my 
right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel?' 
Guidance by counsel. Here is a voucher for the wisdom 
of our guide. You all remember the prophecy of Isaiah 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 



135 



concerning Christ, in which these two thoughts of divine 
counsel and guidance are combined. " His name shall 
be called Counsellor — the Mighty God." 

Now let us look at this very simply and practically. I 
have already said that the need which, as much as any 
other, is representative as we look forward, is the need of 
counsel — sound and wise advice. Every one of us knows 
that he is going forward into difficulties of some kind ; 
that hard problems are on the way to meet him. We 
shall have important decisions to make, and evidence 
will be evenly balanced, and mistake will be easy. More- 
over, every one of us must live some kind of a life, and 
to live rightly is not easy. It is all well enough to talk 
of the sharp distinction between right and wrong, but 
practically we shall not always find the distinction so 
sharp. There is essentially a sharp distinction, but, to 
the average moral perception, right and wrong often 
shade off into each other. The moral sense is a thing 
which requires to be educated. Now in view of these 
facts, which you may be sure are much more serious 
facts in God's eyes than in ours, what does God offer to 
you and me for this year and for coming years? Re- 
member it is a fair and literal offer, and means just 
what it says, which is that you and I can habitually have 
at command the omniscient wisdom of God, if we want 
it ; that no hard question or serious crisis will come to 
you this year or any year, that God will not give you 
His wisdom to determine in the best way ; that no de- 
cision will be forced upon you in which you need make 
a mistake, if you will accept the solution which God shall 



136 THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 

offer you. God offers Himself as your Counsellor : He 
will guide you by His counsel. And that not in great 
matters only. God does not offer Himself to us for 
great emergencies only. The steps of a good man are 
ordered of the Lord. God offers you His wisdom for 
details no less than for crises, and that is important be- 
cause the most of your life consists of small details, and 
your life in bulk will be shaped by the adjustment of 
these details. Is it not worth trying? Suppose that 
for this year you literally accept it as the law of your 
life, to let God take care of you. It comes to that in 
any event. The Father takes care of that timid, mor- 
bid, worrying child, just as He does of the sunny, cheer- 
ful, trustful one. If you ever find rest unto your soul, 
it will be in that way. Why not accept it then at once? 
Why not get some comfort out of it as you go along? 
Keep your hand in God's, your eye upon His face ; do 
what He tells you ; do your best, and believe with all 
your heart that God will do the best for you. I care not 
how many troubles and disappointments you shall meet 
— if you do not say at the close of the year that it has 
been the happiest, or rather the most blessed, year of 
your life, come to me and tell me I have misread God's 
promises. 

But this is not all. One is constantly surprised by 
the correspondence between these words of the Psalms 
and the words of Christ. More and more it seems that 
the Psalms are full of Christ. And surely we cannot 
miss the correspondence here, " This God is our God 
forever and ever; He will be our guide even unto 






THE ETERXAL GUIDE. 



W 



death ": '' Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
of the world." 

The end of the world : death. Ah ! that is what 
troubles many of us most, after all. And yet why do we 
put the emphasis there on the end, as if that were the 
hardest thing : as if we needed guidance and counsel 
and help there more than anywhere ? It does seem to 
me that if we ever come to see this thing from the right 
point, we shall find ourselves more concerned about liv- 
ing than about dying. The great thing is the journey, 
not the end ; because, of course, if the road is the right 
one, the end will be right. We want the guide at the 
end, but in order to that we want Him all the way to 
the end. That is what He says we shall have. u He 
will be our guide even unto death." Beyond death we 
shall have Him if we have Him up to that point, for 
the great object of His guidance is to bring us to His 
own home. Again, the seventy-third Psalm expands the 
thought, " Thou shalt guide me by Thy counsel and 
afterzi'tird take me to glory." That word " take " is very 
suggestive. You find it in the forty-ninth Psalm, " God 
will redeem my soul from the power of the grave, for 
He shall take me." It is the same word which is used in 
the story of Enoch : " Enoch walked with God. and he 
was not, for God took him." Just think how significant 
it is, that, back in that far-off time, long before life and 
immortality were brought to light, the departure from 
life is put in this most beautiful and comforting way — 
being taken by God. Enoch did not die, it lie, but 

that does not alter the case. He had come to the end 



!38 THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 

of life, and God took him, whether through the gate of 
death or by any other gate it mattered not, so long as 
he passed out of life in company with God. The point 
on which that story fixes our thought is, that God with 
whom he had walked all his life took care of him when 
he reached the end. It is not much for the wisdom and 
love which have piloted us through life, to pilot us safely 
out of it. Again, I say, the thing we are to be most 
careful about is life, not death, that God at the end may 
not have to take us from other hands, but simply to 
tighten His grasp on the hand which has been in His all 
along, and which mayhap trembles a little as we pass 
together into the valley of the shadow. We must live, 
we are told, " with eternity in view." Whatever is 
meant by that expression, we most commonly interpret 
it of living with some future and possibly remote thing 
in view, as men who walk with their eyes fixed on the 
city which they are approaching. That is not the right 
way to put it. We ought, indeed, to live with eternity 
in view, but chiefly as those who on their journey keep 
their eyes open to what is around them and at their 
feet. For as I have told you before, we are in eternity 
now. We who are Christians, if Christ is to be believed, 
are to live forever ; and in living to-day have begun 
upon our eternal life. And the spiritual forces which 
bear upon us, the revelations of the things of God, the 
spiritual laws by which we live, the ministries to which 
we are called in Christ's name, communion with God, 
the love of God shed abroad in the heart, faith, duty — 
these heavenly things are not facts of a future eternity 






THE ETERNAL GUIDE. j^g 

merely. They are present facts ; and while we may 
rightly look forward to the consummate joy and fellow- 
ship and knowledge of heaven, our main business is to 
keep in view that side of eternity which pushes forward 
into to-day's life. To live with eternity in view is to 
live, first of all, as one who feels that that Presence 
which gives to eternity all its significance — God the 
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost — is with him here 
and now, and is the first, the greatest, the vital fact of 
to-day : as one who realizes that he is not merely jour- 
neying to the kingdom of God, but is already within its 
lines. We are on the river which leads to the sea. The 
passing out into the open sea is not the great thing now. 
The great, the pressing thing is rather to navigate the 
river safely. . We shall best keep eternity in view by 
using time in the interest of the kingdom of God. 
When God is realized as a present fact, an eternity 
which is centred and summed up in God will not appear 
so strange a thing to us. I remember a glorious morn- 
ing in the tropical sea. The ocean was one expanse of 
emerald and amethyst, flecked with the painted nautilus- 
sails, and shot through with silver flashes of flying- 
fish. Looking down, the purple shoals were visible 
through the shallow water. Around lay savage ledges 
of rock, and through all the ship held on her course 
until a lonely lighthouse on a barren island was passed, 
and then the color of the sea changed, as the shoals and 
ledges fell off into the fathomless abyss. Yet the transi- 
tion was not sharp nor violent, but most beautiful. The 
ocean was still beneath us, though deeper. No tremor 



140 THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 

or shock marked the passage into the deep, dark blue ; 
and so it seems to me it might be as we pass on under 
God's pilotage over the shoals of life, amid all its 
beauty and color, amid the ledges where so many have 
been wrecked, and onward to where the last point is 
passed and life falls away into immortality. We need 
not fear as the water deepens. The same hand is on 
the wheel. It is life still into which we are moving, but 
with a fuller swell, a larger sweep, a deeper depth of joy 
and rest. God will take us. If we would but learn to 
translate that hard word " death " into God's taking us. 
At the beginning of this year, as of past years, you con- 
front the possibility that you may die this year. You 
shrink from the thought. There is no wrong in that ; 
but put it to yourself in this way : I go forward into 
this year with God holding me by my right hand. Sup- 
pose that some time this year, as we go on together, 
He shall lead me out at the gate which opens on heaven. 
What then? He leads you ; He takes you ; that is the 
only fact worth considering. If God is your Guide here 
and now, be sure He will be your Guide even unto 
death. All the possibilities which death may bring are 
happily disposed of by the simple fact that He is your 
Guide forever and ever. 

And we may carry the same truth into our larger rela- 
tions as citizens. The past year has been one of unrest. 
There have been mutterings of thunder from more than 
one quarter of the heavens ; tremors and upheavings of 
the social strata which are full of menace. We are going 
forward into a year of unsolved, difficult, radical prob- 



THE ETERNAL GUIDE. 



141 



lems, and our wisdom seems small and contemptible in 
the face of their colossal tangle. We may well be rest- 
less and fearful, if our little social theories and our crude 
political institutions are all that we have with which to 
face these things. The people of this land would have 
no reason to fear or to be restless, would they but accept 
loyally and frankly these words of the old Psalm, and 
take God as their guide forever and ever. That is too 
much to look for now. But remember that through 
all national convulsions, through all the confusion and 
wreck which men engender by refusing God as their 
guide, God leads safely those who put their hands in 
His. Many of you are familiar with Kaulbach's great 
fresco of the destruction of Jerusalem. You remember 
the awful confusion that rages round the temple porch, 
the laying waste of the holiest shrine, the horrors of car- 
nage which gather round the altar where the high-priest 
stabs himself in despair. And you remember, too, that 
lovely group in one corner of the picture, a Christian 
family making its way out of the doomed city under 
the conduct of an angel, a mother with her little ones 
mounted upon an ass, the father by their side, and every 
feature and attitude of the group pervaded with a heav- 
enly calm. The very beast, as he moves leisurely on, 
plucks at the green boughs in his path. God is their 
guide forever. The attending angel holds high in his 
hand the cup of covenant, and we might almost fancy 
them singing, " God is our refuge and strength, a very 
present help in trouble ; therefore will not we fear, 
though the earth be removed, and though the moun 



:_: THE ETERXAL GUIDE. 

tains be carried into the midst of the sea." Would that 
the whole earth, all people and nations, would accept 
this guidance. None the less, if they refuse, God is true 
to His own : He will guide them by His counsel, and 
afterward take them to glory. 



X. 

KNOWING BY DOING. 

■ If any man wiileth to do His 'drill, he shall know of 
the teaching whether it be of God, or whether I 
speak from myself." — John vii. 17. 

It was a vain and frivolous question which those Jews 
raised as they listened to Christ in the temple. Curi- 
osity and not conscience prompted it. It was not wheth- 
er there was anything in the teaching worth their hear- 

; and heeding — whether it was indeed a message from 
God: but how had Christ learned what He taught? 
How knoweth this man letters, having never learned ? 

Our Lord will not satisfy them on that point. That 
is none of their business : but He turns their thought to 
the question which they ought to have asked : Is this 
teaching of God : Now then dial is the - ;: ques- 
tion which ought to be called out by any new teaching. 
Now, as then, there are those who are less concerned 

. the substance of a man's teaching than as to wbc 
and how he acquired it. He is in the teacher's pla: 
by what stairway did he mount to i: : What is his 
school of theology? Whose system does he interpr^: \ 
Such questioners will find very little sympathy in the 
Scriptures. The test to which the Bible ; igs all teach- 
ing is. Is it of God ? If it is, it matters nothing through 

what school it came, or if it came through no school at 

1143) 



144 



KNOWING BY DOING. 



all. That is the point to which Christ aims to bring 
round the mind of the Jews in this answer of His. The 
answer thus contains two points, i. The thing which 
alone concerns you in this teaching of mine is, whether 
it is of God. 2. In order to know this, practice it. Do 
the will of God : that will show you whether the teach- 
ing is divine or not. You will see then whether I learned 
these lessons from God, or whether I speak from myself, 
out of my own reason or fancy. 

This old question, not the one raised by the Jews, 
but the one suggested by Christ, is not yet laid. Teach- 
ers there are in multitudes, too many by far, with all 
sorts of credentials and with no credentials. The people 
cannot but hear. But more than one earnest soul is 
asking, Whence is the teaching? This teaching about 
religion — much of it comes to us with the stamp of tra- 
dition, countersigned by the schools, represented by 
great names ; but we find the great names heading par- 
ties, and the schools wrangling. How much of the 
teaching is of God ? How much is God's and how 
much man's ? How much are we to believe ? In all 
this confusion of tongues over science and religion, rea- 
son and faith, new and old theology, theories of atone- 
ment and inspiration, Unitarian and Trinitarian, Calvin- 
ist and Arminian, high-church and low-church and broad- 
church — which voice is God's ? Tell us what God says 
about truth and duty, and we will be content. 

And not only rival books and systems make trouble 
for us. For a part of our teaching we are pointed to 
facts. We are bidden to note how God has written 



KNOWING BY DOING. • 14 $ 

Himself down in the ordering of this world. We are 
told that God teaches by providence no less than by 
the Word ; and they bid us look at history and at soci- 
ety and see how God teaches in these. And yet — the 
facts are ugly facts many of them ; facts with which 
the compact formulas of the catechisms and theologies 
deal about as effectively as a boy's cross-bow would 
deal with Dover cliffs. We ministers now and then 
come to places which the Confession of Faith and the 
Catechism do not cover. God rules the world no 
doubt. I believe it, but on other testimony than what 
the ordering of the world furnishes to my observation. 
The seething deeps of society throw to the surface 
here and there horrible practical problems ; foul things 
not classified in the canons of Westminster and Dort ; 
distorted lives which cannot be stretched back into 
symmetry on the frame of the Thirty-nine Articles. Con- 
front a tenement-house with the words " God is love." 
Bring the corpse of that poor baby, smothered by a 
drunken mother, and let its white, pinched face look up 
into that pulpit from which come such eloquent and 
truthful words about the fatherhood of God. And then 
— this whole range of teaching about duty — how much 
of it is of God ? What does God say that you and I 
ought to do ? Among so many demands, which is the 
imperative demand ? Many teachers tell us to do and 
to believe many things. How shall we know which 
teaching is of God, or whether any of them are of God ? 
Faith ! but what ought we to believe ? The Bible ! but 
which of its interpreters? 
7 



146 KNOWING BY DOING. 

This is the present attitude of a good many minds ; 
and the temptation to such is to set down summarily 
the whole matter as a hopeless muddle, and to conclude 
that the teaching of God is and must remain an un- 
known quantity. 

And yet thus much is plain. Given the Being we are 
taught to believe in and worship and obey as God, an 
intelligible revelation of His will follows of necessity, 
else loyalty and duty are the veriest farce. No obliga- 
tion binds me to serve a God whose will I do not know. 
That is the simplest of axioms. That I should know 
all about Him, that I should comprehend His plans and 
be acquainted with the reasons for His acts, is impos- 
sible. If it were possible, He would not be God. Clouds 
envelop the sun, we know ; but if the sun be not 
strong enough to send light through the clouds suffi- 
cient to make a day in the cloudiest weather, even 
though it be a dark day, there might as well be no 
sun. Our great practical demand is met, if God, in any 
way, teaches us what we ought to do, and how we ought 
to feel toward Him and our fellow-men. As a fact He 
teaches us much more than this; but, if Christ is to be 
believed, all the teaching necessary to our pure, blessed, 
useful living is clearly given by God. Christ plainly 
says that men need not walk in darkness. He says that 
-a revelation of God's will is given which is to men's 
moral and spiritual life what the sunlight is to the work- 
ing day. If any man walk in this day he stumbleth not, 
because he seeth the light of this world. " The light is 
with you," He tells the Jews, " walk while ye have it." 



KNOWING BY DOING. 



147 



Christ Himself claims to be this light. He professes 
to meet the demand for God's teaching. " Hear me, and 
you shall hear what God teaches. Follow me and you 
shall do the will of God. Know me, and you shall 
know God, for I and my Father are one, and he that 
hath seen me hath seen the Father. My teaching is the 
teaching of Him that sent me." " So far, well," says the 
world. " That is a fair response to our challenge. You 
profess to give us what we ask for — God's teaching. 
But how shall we test it ? What evidence does it carry 
with it that it is of God ? How shall we know ?" And 
Christ answers, " By simple experiment. Practice the 
teaching and it will vindicate itself as of God. Do what 
God wills as you shall learn it of me, and the divinity of 
the teaching will manifest itself to you. If any man 
wills to do His will, he shall know of the teaching 
whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself." 

Christ thus puts practice before knowledge, or rather 
practice as a means to knowledge ; and in this He lays 
down no arbitrary or unfamiliar law. The best of our 
knowledge, all of it indeed that is practically useful, is 
gained through practice. A young man goes to an en- 
gineering school, and studies algebra and geometry and 
trigonometry and surveying. He learns thoroughly all 
that is in the books. But take him directly from his 
books, put him down on a new line of railroad and tell 
him to lay out a curve, and he will need the engineer's 
help. You can teach a lad all about the proper motions 
in swimming. He will move his hands and feet just as 
the best swimmer does; but throw him off that pier- 



148 KNOWING BY DOING. 

head into twenty feet of water, and it is ten to one that 
he sinks. Just so the teaching of Christ will not vindi- 
cate itself as of God by your merely studying it in the 
New Testament and in the light of the best sermons and 
commentaries. Knowledge is bound up with practice. 
No man ever learned to paint or to play upon an instru- 
ment by merely studying and mastering the theories of 
painting and music. He must handle the brush and 
finger the keys himself. No man ever learned the truth 
and will of God without doing His will. The doing is 
just as much a part of the learning as the studying. Do- 
ing is a mode of study. 

If any man then willeth to do God's will, he shall 
know of the teaching whether it be of God. Practice 
vindicates theory. A theory which will not work is al- 
ready disproved. Christ thus invites the fairest and 
simplest and most decisive test of His teaching. Try 
it and see if it works. When you are trying to make 
a pupil understand the ideas of a foreign author, you 
have to translate the author's words into the pupil's 
own language. The teaching of God remains an un- 
known tongue until it is rendered into doing. But let 
us look at this passage a little more closely. 

The first step toward knowing the teaching of God is 
a determination to do it. The word of the text ex- 
presses more than a mere desire or wish. It means a 
resolution of the will. If any man wills to do His will. 
It is the same word by which Christ expresses His pur- 
pose : " I will that those whom Thou hast given me be 
with me where I am." " If I will that he tarry till I 



KNOWING BY DOING. I4g 

come, what is that to thee ? " A man says, " I should like 
to know how to write shorthand." That is all it comes 
to. Another man says, " I will learn shorthand," and 
he goes to work at it. There is the difference. There 
is a great deal of vague wishing and talking, both out of 
the Church and within it, about wanting to know God's 
will : a great deal of sentimental aspiration, which is 
worth no more than the breath which utters it. Not a 
few people seem to take it for granted that the teaching 
of God is a hazy sort of thing, and that moral and re- 
ligious action must needs be at best a groping in the 
twilight. And, if the truth were known, they rather 
comfort themselves with this haziness, and take refuge in 
it from the clear dictates of duty, heaving an occasional 
sigh, " Ah, if we only knew the will of God ! If His 
teaching were only a little plainer." Christ nowhere 
concedes this haziness. As before remarked, He puts 
the teaching of God as a thing out in the light, definite, 
comprehensible. Here He says distinctly, " Man shall 
know of the teaching: Any man shall know who will 
take the right way to know." The first step in this 
right way is determination. It is not enough that 3 
man be merely willing to know. He must will to know. 
Some people take the attitude of being ready and will 
ing to know if the knowledge shall be brought to them 
and forced upon their conviction ; but the knowledge of 
God's teaching is not brought to men in that way. It 
is something to be won, not for the man, but by him : 
and his professed willingness proves itself a sham if it do 
not translate itself into the energy of a resolved will. 



150 KNOWING BY DOING. 

This energy displays itself first in subjection. If one 
wills to do another's will, he puts himself under that 
will, absolutely, and obeys it, surrendering his own will. 
That is subjection. That is what Christ means when He 
says, " Take my yoke upon you and learn of me. Deny 
self and follow me." And Christ, as in so many other 
cases, is not laying down a new or an arbitrary law. It 
is a law which men everywhere recognize, that obedience 
is the first step in all learning : — doing what one is told, 
not because he understands it, but because he is told ; 
because another wills it. When a child sits down to the 
piano to take his first lesson in music, he is taking the 
first step toward knowledge of the laws of harmony ; 
toward getting his ear trained to grasp and analyze 
masses of sound ; toward bringing the fingers into such 
perfect sympathy with the brain that they shall instinct- 
ively interpret the musical conception as it arises. But 
all that is in the future. He has no thought of that 
now. He could not understand it if he were told. He 
will reach it only by accepting now the teacher's word, 
" that key gives A, that one B, and those sounds answer 
to marks on such a line or space." He moves his fingers 
as the teacher directs. The teacher knows what all this 
is tending to. He does not. By and by, through the 
mechanical drudgery, rudimental conceptions of harmony 
begin to take shape. He begins to pick out and make 
chords for himself; to combine the rudiments into melo- 
dies and harmonies ; and so on, until he grasps and in- 
terprets the works of a Beethoven or a Wagner. All 
learning, I say, comes to men in this way. We rise on 



KNOWING BY DOING. 



151 



the steps of mechanical obedience to the grasp of prin- 
ciples and to self-determination. 

In a popular story by a well-known English writer 
occurs this little scene which is a good illustration of 
this truth. A Scotch youth is telling his companion his 
experience in the study of arithmetic. Says he, " I 
plagued the master sore with wanting to understand 
everything before I would go on with my sums. Says 
he one day, ' My man, if you will aye understand afore 
ye do as ye're tell't, ye will never understand anything ; 
but if ye do the thing as I tell ye, ye'll be in the midst 
of it afore ye know ye're goin' into it.' I just thought 
I would try him. It was at long division that I boglet 
most. Well, I went on, and I could do the thing well 
enough, and aye I thought the master was wrong, for 
I never knew the reason of all that beginning at the 
wrong end, and takin' down and subtractin' and all that. 
Vou would hardly believe it, it was only this very day I 
was sitting in the kirk. It was a long psalm they were 
singing: long division came into my head again, and 
first one bit glimmering of light came in, and soon 
another, and before the psalm was done I saw through 
the whole process of it. But you see if I had not 
done as I was told, and learned all about how it was 
done beforehand, I should have had nothing to go 
reasoning about, and would have found out nothing." 

I think about the whole matter is contained in that 
little story. You will acquire divine knowledge in the 
same way as you acquire human knowledge, by the 
road of obedience. So many fail because they do 



1 5 2 KNO WING B Y DOING. 

not like to obey without knowing the reason why. 
They want God to deal with them as equals, not as 
inferiors. To follow this line of implicit obedience is 
to become children ; and that, they think, is not digni- 
fied. But there is no other way so far as I know. 
Christ allows no other way. " Except ye become as 
little children ye cannot enter into the kingdom of God." 
That kingdom is something which you and I can receive. 
Christ says so : but He says that we must receive it as a 
little child or not at all. Strangely enough, men do not 
think themselves humbled when asked to do this same 
thing elsewhere than in religion. If a mature man wants 
to learn German or French, he does what his teacher 
bids him ; writes exercises, and learns conjugations and 
declensions, not knowing always the reason why. But 
when he approaches the greatest and most profound of 
all subjects, mysteries which the very angels desire to 
look into, he refuses the subjection he would yield to an 
equal and often to an inferior, and thinks himself in- 
sulted because God asks him to take the attitude of a 
docile pupil. 

No doubt the divine teaching involves a theology and 
a philosophy. Beyond doubt there is a system and a 
plan back of all the details of obedience : but the way 
to these is by these details, whether their relation to the 
system is understood or not. If one begins at the other 
end, and refuses the obedience until he shall have be- 
come acquainted with the philosophy, he will gain at 
best a superficial philosophy, a botched theology, and 
will not reach the practice at all. 



KNOWING BY DOING. 



153 



Teaching you by practice, God will give you lessons 
out of much besides books. You are resolved, let us 
say, to follow Christ's method : to learn God's teaching 
by doing His will. Well, the practical test of your 
resolution lies in this: are you ready to do the first 
thing that Christ tells you ? In that case, your first 
teacher will probably be, not that robed priest or that 
grave professor of ethics. He may start up in the shape 
of that troublesome beggar. He may ring at your door 
in the person of that inquisitive, talkative, tedious man. 
He may come in that little child that disturbs your 
study hours and disarranges your books and papers. 
He may be that blundering clerk or that careless house- 
servant. Your lesson book may open at that common- 
place occasion which calls for a kind word and a trivial 
service kindly done, or for a restraint of temper or a 
little sacrifice of convenience. These seem trifles com- 
pared with the study of systems and the learned com- 
parison of texts and authorities ; none the less, your 
road to the larger and fuller knowledge of God lies 
through these and through meeting each of them, as it 
comes, in Christ's spirit and way ; doing in each case 
what the Gospel tells you Christ did or would have 
done. These things will set you studying one book at 
least, and will furnish you with a new and strangely 
vivid commentary upon it. 

You never will approach a truthful conception of 
Christ's character until you shall have honestly begun to 
try and do and feel as He did. You are troubled and 
perplexed over many hard questions about Christianity. 

7* 



154 



KNOWING BY DOING. 



I do not ask you to give them up as insoluble : only to 
give yourself implicitly to Christ in full faith that He 
will guide you : only to lay them aside for the present, 
and simply undertake, with God's help, to do the duty 
which lies next you. You will have quite enough to do, 
though your course will be simplified. You may seem 
to yourself to be farther than ever from the solution of 
your hard problems, but you will probably be getting on 
faster than you think. Sometimes, when you have been 
working your way over a long, rough road toward a 
town which you saw at a distance, some one has pointed 
you to a more direct road ; but in taking that you lost 
sight of the town altogether for the time being, only to 
come upon it before you expected to. Meanwhile, in 
your endeavor to do God's will in whatever shape it may 
appeal to you, you will be getting the most satisfactory 
kind of evidence that Christ's teaching is of God — the 
evidence of experience. You have been, for instance, a 
care-oppressed, anxious man, burdened and troubled 
with the possibilities of the future. You have made an 
honest fight with your fears, and, accepting Christ's 
teaching about divine providence, have cast your care 
on Him, and have resolutely let to-morrow take thought 
for the things of itself. And you have been surprised 
to find how well it worked. You have been forced to 
say, " Such a prescription for a care-burdened mind was 
never framed by human science." You have learned to 
know God as the great care-taker ; and living in the 
cheerful discharge of each day's duty as it came, and 
looking back at the old, anxious years, lying like a black 






KNOWING BY DOING. 



155 



cloud-bank on the far horizon, you have wondered and 
mourned that you did not sooner grasp that teaching of 
God which would have filled those years with light. 
You have tried to love your neighbor as yourself ; to be 
to your fellow-man just what Christ would have you be. 
It has been hard sometimes, but your honest effort has 
brought its reward. Through your neighbor you have 
drawn nearer to God. Through the results of your 
brotherly dealing with your neighbor, you have caught 
a glimpse of God's ideal of a perfect society. You have 
come to say, " Love is the simple solution of the whole 
problem of civilization : God's teaching goes to the roots 
of the question as no human teaching does." Through 
your bearing your brother's burden and taking his sor- 
row on your heart, you have gotten a look into God's 
heart, and a conception of God's vast, tender meaning 
toward humanity underlying His teaching about love 
and patience and sympathy. 

And so, more and more, you find yourself not only gain- 
ing new knowledge, but gaining it by a new and unsus- 
pected way : that is to say, you are gaining knowledge 
of God's teaching through knowledge of God himself. 
You are coming to see how God's teaching is bound up 
with His character: how it is the laying bare of God's 
very heart. Now you begin to understand why Christ 
emphasized the bare fact of the teaching being of God. 
Doing God's will brings you close to God, and the better 
you know your teacher the better you understand His 
teaching. Through this doing of His will, you find God 
looming up larger than you have seen Him in the books 



156 KNOWING BY DOING. 

and systems : you find His nature overflowing the lines 
of the creeds. As you mount, hour by hour, often with 
toil and pain, over the hard rocks of daily duty, your 
horizon widens, and the air becomes clearer, and new 
stars appear. True, you find yourself drawing nearer to 
the infinite. True, the conviction grows upon you that 
this God is not to be found out by searching. True, 
you have discovered that His teaching ranges beyond 
the farthest stretch of human thought ; but you have 
found God himself. You have found the greatest thing 
in all the teaching ; and that is the teacher. It was 
surely no loss to Job, after his fearful struggle to under- 
stand the hard lesson of God's providence, that God, in- 
stead of explaining His dealings, revealed himself. Once 
assured that he had touched God, he could afford to 
leave the why and wherefore of providence to take care 
of themselves. It was not the answer he had asked for, 
but it was a larger and a better one. It is no small gain 
to have gotten a grasp upon the infinite. Infinitude, to 
the man who surveys it through books and tries to re- 
solve its nebulae by systems, is despair. To the man 
who lays hold upon it, it is rest. 

Hence, one of the elements of your new knowledge 
will be that there are things which you cannot know : 
things which God cannot or will not impart to you. If 
you have that truth told you by books, it will only in- 
crease your restlessness, and put you at war with God. 
If you learn it from your personal contact with God, it 
will quiet and satisfy you. You count it no small step in 
your child's training when he has come to be satisfied not 



KNOWING BY DOING. 157 

to know on the mere strength of his trust in his father. 
To know God is the best solution of mysteries. To know 
that teaching is from God is to be satisfied that you will 
be taught all that you ought to know. Through this 
process you will have reached not only the teaching of 
God, but what is more important, the result of that 
teaching, the secret of life. For, as I have said, you 
will come to know God as revealed in His Son ; " and 
this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, 
and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." 
You shall know that life as you know your own natural 
life — not its ultimate mystery, but as a conscious divine 
force in you — Christ formed within ; as an ever-burning 
and yearning love ; as a steady impulse to duty ; as a 
rest in toil ; as a comfort in sorrow ; as a controlling 
wisdom ; as an intelligent sympathy ; as a translator of 
the commonplace into the heavenly. Then you can go 
back to your systems if you choose. You will have got- 
ten the clue of them into your hand. They will be your 
servants and not your masters thenceforth. They will 
help you to define and state much which you will have 
learned already in another way : but even as you study 
the books and tables of the astronomers, conscious all 
the while that the starry universe is vaster than all the 
books and maps, so you will be ever aware that God in 
Christ spans the systems and the creeds, and that His 
truth is more and greater than all of them combined. 
Then the Bible will carry a meaning for you which you 
never grasped in all your ransacking of the commentaries. 
It will be the very voice of your Father speaking to your 






158 KNOWING BY DOING. 

filial heart, every inflection noted by the intuition of a 
loving child, and responded to with the quickness and 
ardor of a living sympathy. No man ever understands 
the Bible until he has honestly tried to live it. 

The practical lesson is plain and direct. The teach- 
ing of God is the expression of His will. His will, so 
far as regards all that is vital in your life and mine, may 
be known ; must be made known, if allegiance and duty 
are anything more than names. Do you want to know 
it ? Is it your will to know it ? Prove it, then, by be- 
ginning to do it. Strike at once into the line of simple 
obedience. That effort will be a revelation in itself. 
Walking hitherto with a vague, half-defined wish to 
know God's teaching, with your eyes strained as to- 
ward some far-off nebulous thing, you have been over- 
looking and trampling upon scores of lessons lying at 
your very feet. The teaching of God is a thing of to- 
day ; a thing of this hour. " The word is nigh thee, 
even in thy heart and in thy mouth." Draw back your 
eyes. Look down at the duty of the hour. Hear what 
Christ has to say about your life to-day ; and set your 
energies at work to make to-day's life Christ-like. Is 
there a duty in your home ? Do it. Is there an indul- 
gence to be cut off ? Cut it off. Is there a right feel- 
ing to be encouraged, or a wrong one to be suppressed ? 
Do it. Not in your own strength, oh, no. Every one 
of these occasions, in bringing you face to face with 
some difficulty or self-denial or bad antipathy in your 
own nature, will teach you your own weakness, which is 
part of God's teaching ; will teach you to pray, which is 



KNOWING BY DOING. 



159 



another part ; will teach you God's helpfulness, which 
is still another part. You will have made good prog- 
ress by the time you shall have mastered those three. 
Do not be afraid of going slowly. Do not be afraid 
that, by your attention to these details, you are miss- 
ing something greater. As well fear that you will miss 
that lofty summit and the prospect it commands by 
setting one foot before another. " He that believeth 
shall not make haste." It is a great study upon which 
you have entered, great as eternity itself, and you are 
not going to leap to results. The results lie along the 
separate steps no less than at the end, if there could be 
any end. And thus you shall come to the knowledge of 
God, not only as something grasped, but as something 
wrought up into your very self, and will be drawing 
nearer to that likeness to Him through which you shall 
see Him as He is. 



XL 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 



" Hereby shall we know that we are of the truth, ana 
shall assure our heart before Him whereinso- 
ever our heart condemn us ; because God is greater 
than our heart and knoweth all things. Beloved, 
if our heart condemn us not, we have boldness 
toward God ; and whatsoever we ask we receive 
of Him, because we keep His com?nand?nents and 
do the things that are pleasing in His sight." — 
i John iii. 19-22. 

I GIVE you here, you observe, a different rendering of 
this text from the one in your English Bibles, which is 
a mistaken one. This, I hope, will appear on our ex 
amination of the text. 

The subject with which these verses deal, is an accus- 
ing conscience and its antidote. The season of ap- 
proach to the Lord's table is, to many sincere Christians, 
a time of close self-scrutiny ; the result of which is, in 
many cases, to awaken distressing doubts and misgiv- 
ings as to their spiritual condition, and as to the propriety 
of their participating in this solemn and delightful rite. 
Such, especially, will be helped and comforted by a care- 
ful study of this text. 

This chapter turns upon two thoughts — the nature of 

our relation to God, and its evidence. The first thought 

introduces the chapter in a burst of affectionate enthu- 
(160) 



GOD GREATER THAT OUR HEART. j.61 

siasm — " Behold what manner of love the Father hath 
bestowed upon us that we should be called children of 
God : and such we are." There is our relation to God : 
not sous, as in our version, but children. The difference 
is that sons indicates the position and privilege of one's 
offspring ; whereas John's thought goes back of that to 
the community of nature. We are children of God, 
sprung from Him, made in His image. It is a Father's 
love which calls us children. 

The rest of the chapter deals with the evidence of 
this fact. How do we know that we are children of 
God ? John answers, " By your likeness to God. If 
you are of one nature, children, you will be like Him ; 
and when your childship shall be perfected and you 
shall see God as He is, the perfection will consist in be- 
ing like Him. But that likeness must be foreshadowed 
in you here and now. God is a God of righteousness 
and of law. Every one that hath this hope in him 
purifieth himself even as He is pure. He that doeth 
righteousness is righteous even as He is righteous. 
But further, God's righteous law is also a law of love. 
Love is the fulfilling of the law. This is the message 
which ye heard from the beginning, that we should love 
one another." 

Here John brings the evidence to a focus. All evi- 
dences of our being children of God concentrate in love. 
" He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in 
him." To this test John attaches the highest value. 
To his mind it is the decisive evidence of a transition 
from the kingdom of evil to the kingdom of God. " We 



1 62 GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 

know that we have passed from death unto life, because 
we love the brethren. He that loveth not, abideth in 
death." And again, in our text — " Hereby " — that is, 
in the fact that we love each other in deed and in truth 
— " Hereby shall we know that we are of the truth." 

" And," he goes on, " we shall assure our hearts before 
Him in whatsoever our heart condemn us." We need 
assurance then. This great evidence of love has mis- 
giving to meet and to quiet. Is it strange that there 
should be such misgiving? Look at the standard of 
Christian character set up in this chapter. When one 
brings himself to such tests, is it strange if he hesitates ? 
In the consciousness of infirmity, with the remembrance 
of error, under the pressure of daily temptation, is it 
strange if he is moved to say, " I cannot answer these 
tests. My heart accuses and condemns me" ? 

Now, John does not say that the heart may not ac- 
cuse justly. He does not say that a child of God is sin- 
less by virtue of his relation as a child, and that his self- 
accusation is quieted by being pronounced groundless. 
It is entirely possible that one's heart may justly accuse 
him of sin, and that God's judgment may confirm the 
accusation of the heart ; but he does mean to say that 
the heart is not the supreme and final arbiter ; and that 
whatever it may accuse us of, must be referred to a 
higher tribunal. Consequently you will observe that 
emphasis is to be laid on the words, " before Him." We 
shall assure our hearts before Him. 

It is an essential characteristic of Christian life that 
it is lived out in the very sight of God. The true child 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 163 

of God sets the Lord always before his face. The prime 
regulator of his life is the sense of God's presence ; 
God's manifestation in Christ is his model; God's law 
gives his conscience its tone of commendation or re- 
buke. This is a natural and necessary result of the 
relation assumed in the text — child of God. As chil- 
dren of God, in our Father's house, life is regulated by 
the perpetual consciousness of our Father's presence 
and scrutiny. 

The Christian consciousness exercises a judicial office 
in us, approving or condemning ; our heart passes judg- 
ment , but what we need especially to remember is that 
this office is a subordinate one, and that the decrees of 
the heart must, in every case, be carried up to a higher 
tribunal for ratification. God is greater than our heart. 
God knoweth all things, while our heart is ignorant and 
blind. Whatever light or power of discernment con- 
science has, it receives from God. The reason for in- 
sisting on this will be clear to you if you reflect how 
many self-accusing Christians there are, and that, while 
the self-accusation is, in many cases, just and wholesome, 
it is, in other cases, unjust, exaggerated, and impelled 
by morbid and distorted conditions. The review of life 
recalls a thousand lapses, a multitude of hasty words and 
tempers. There is the sense of shortcoming, of not hav- 
ing made the best of one's self ; there is the fear of un- 
conscious error and injury ; the suspicion of secret fault ; 
there is the morbid torment over fancied or possible 
sins : a thousand phases of this self-accusation will occur 
to every one of you. 



1 64 GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 

And it is, moreover, an unfortunate fact that not a 
few Christians live habitually in this state of self-accu- 
sation. They are so absorbed in the contemplation of 
their own unworthiness that they see nothing else. 
They live in anticipation of divine judgment. Life is 
one continuous arraignment at the bar of conscience, 
spite of all their prayer and striving and study of the 
Word. Is this right ? Is this Scriptural ? Is this 
Christ's ideal of life in God's family? Is this what John 
has in mind when he says, " Behold what manner of love 
the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be 
called children of God " ? Is it the appropriate daily 
employment of a child of God to be a mere bookkeeper, 
writing down bitter things against himself ? 

And then, once more, it is true that too many of 
these self-accusing Christians do not carry up their case 
from the bar of the heart. They practically accept the 
heart's accusation as final, and do not raise the question 
before a higher court. And it is at this mistake that 
the apostle's words are aimed. He is teaching us how 
we may assure or quiet our heart before God, wherein- 
soever our heart condemn us. The whole text carries 
a protest and an antidote against that type of piety 
which is too contemplative and self-scrutinizing ; which 
is always studying self for the evidences of a right spir- 
itual relation and condition ; which tests growth in grace 
by the tension of feeling ; which limits God's presence 
by the sense of His presence ; which reckons the spirit- 
ual latitude and longitude by the temperature of emo- 
tion, as if a sailor should take his reckoning by the 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. ^5 

thermometer. You have heard people say that they 
were conscious of a presence behind them in the room, 
though they saw and heard nothing. That is a well- 
established fact ; but for all that, you would not depend 
upon that subtle sense to inform you of the arrival of 
some one for whom you were impatiently waiting, and 
whose coming was a matter of life or death. But that 
is precisely the habit of such souls. They say they feel 
God is near, in which case they assume that He is near ; 
or they do not feel that He is near, in which case they 
conclude that He is absent, and therefore condemn 
themselves. The apostle Paul did not put the matter 
in that way even when he was addressing pagans. He 
said : " He is not far from every one of us." And when 
he spoke to men who lived by faith, he said, " The 
righteousness which is of faith saith, The word is nigh 
thee, even in thy heart and in thy mouth." 

In short, we cannot trust such testimonies. Feeling, 
religious sensibility, have their place in the Christian 
economy, and a high and sacred place it is : but its 
place is not the judgment-seat. Even the renewed 
heart is not infallible. Its judgments must be reviewed 
and countersigned before they are accepted as decisive. 
The pupil is not the proper judge of his own rate of in- 
tellectual progress, or of his grade of attainment. The 
teacher knows more about those matters ; and the heart 
of man, which is the subject and the pupil of God's sav- 
ing and educating process, which is under God's hand 
because it is by nature blind and deceitful, cannot be 
depended upon to furnish truthful and complete indica- 



1 66 GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 

tions of spiritual attainment and condition. We must 
look outside of self for the highest tests of self. The 
racer in the arena kept his eyes fixed, not upon his own 
limbs, but upon the goal where the master of the games 
was sitting; and therefore the writer to the Hebrews 
says, " Let us run the race looking unto Jesus." Your 
conviction of being a child of God may create in you 
joyful and confident feelings, but it is not based on your 
feelings. You do not count yourself a child of God be- 
cause you somehow have a sense that you are. You 
look out of yourself to the cross, to the sharply-defined 
fact, Christ died there for my sins ; and you accept the 
fact, and rest on it, and are at peace. 

And therefore in this text we are pointed away from 
our own hearts. It is not before ourselves that we are 
to assure ourselves. We cannot expect to allay self-con- 
demnation by self-communion. We bring self and the 
condemning heart before Him. What we need is not to 
be self-assured, but to be assured by Him who is greater 
than our heart, and knoweth all things. 

You see then that, if this passage be taken as it is 
commonly understood, it fosters rather than counteracts 
the tendency to self-scrutiny, and throws us practically 
back upon the lower court. " If our heart condemn us, 
it is because God is greater than our heart and knoweth 
all things." The course of reasoning in that case is, — if 
my heart accuses me, the accusation of God, who is 
greater than my heart, must be much larger and severer, 
because He, knowing all things, sees how much greater 
my sin is than my heart tells me. Do you not see that 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 167 

this is accepting the decision of the heart as infallible 
and making God confirm it ? 

No, indeed. Christian experience is not to be tested 
finally and decisively by the witness of the heart. It is 
before Him that we are to bring that witness. 

And when we have once grasped that truth, what a 
wealth of assurance and comfort we find in it. How it 
lifts the whole life into an atmosphere of confidence and 
peace. So long as I go groping about my own heart for 
assurance and hope, I am as a man blindly feeling after 
God. When I come out of self, and go and stand before 
Him as He stands revealed to me in Jesus Christ, I see 
something ; I get a firm grasp on something ; I have 
gotten above the mist, and the full light of heaven con- 
centrates itself upon Him who so loved me as to give 
His life for me ; and I say with our apostle, " That 
which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, 
which our hands have handled of the word of life, de- 
clare we unto you. Our fellowship is with the Father, 
and with His Son Jesus Christ." 

Just think what it is to escape from the maze and 
mist of a self-accusing spirit, and to come up into the 
light and comfort of a divine Father's house and pres- 
ence. To exchange the dreary companionship of self 
for the fellowship of God in Christ. Before Him. Be- 
loved, now are we children of God. Before Him, we 
are before our Father. Would not an accused child 
rather appear before his father than before any other 
judge? Would not his filial instinct tell him that 
there he could be sure of all patience, tenderness, and 



1 68 GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 

tolerance? Would he not draw comfort and confi- 
dence from his knowledge that the father knew him, 
knew all about his dispositions, his training, his circum- 
stances? That is just the assurance which is given us in 
the fact of God's fatherhood. We carry our self-accusing 
hearts to our Father. We go as children of God. Such 
we are ; and " like as a father pitieth his children, so the 
Lord pitieth them that fear Him. He knoweth our 
frame " — how you and I are made up ; all our heritages 
of temper and disposition; all our natural infirmity; all 
the points where we are weakest against temptation ; all 
our easily-besetting sins. There is not much difference 
between us when we stand there ; at least the Psalmist 
recognizes none, for according to him we are all but as 
dust in God's sight. As children of God, all alike we 
are subjects of God's pity. 

We shall assure our hearts before Him in whatsoever 
our heart condemn us. What then is the nature of the 
assurance ? What the burden of the comfort we are to 
receive at His hands? Not the assurance that we are 
not sinners. Turn back to the first chapter of this 
Epistle. " If we say that we have no sin, we lead our- 
selves astray, and the truth is not in us." Not the as- 
surance that we have not committed sin. Read again : 
" If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar 
and His word is not in us." You and I go before God as 
sinful men. We bring a justly accusing heart. The testi- 
mony of conscience may be true to the letter. We are 
often constrained to say to conscience, even in the clear 
light of our Father's house: "Thou art justified when 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 



l6g 



thou speakest ; thou art clear when thou judgest." 
And yet, "we shall assure our heart before Him, in 
whatsoever our heart condemn us." Nor, assuming the 
condemnation of our heart to be just, shall our sense of 
the exceeding vileness of sin be mitigated in that clearer 
light. We shall find in our Father no compromise of 
His infinite holiness, no easy tolerance of sin ; but as we 
enter that presence-chamber, this disciple whom Jesus 
loved meets us and puts into our hands a scroll on which 
is written, "*If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just 
to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all un- 
righteousness." " If any man sin, we have an advocate 
with God, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He is the 
propitiation for our sins." " Hereby perceive we the 
love of God, because Christ laid down His life for us.' 
Our judge is our -Saviour. We come unto "God the 
judge of all," but to " Jesus the mediator of a new cove- 
nant, and to the blood of sprinkling which speaketh bet- 
ter things than that of Abel." Beautifully says Luther, 
" If our conscience makes us disheartened and puts God 
before us as angry, God is yet greater than our heart. 
The conscience is a single drop, but the propitiated God 
is a sea of comfort." 

But note that our text clearly states the great ground 
of assurance — the thing with which God himself assures 
our hearts. The great question underlying all this chap- 
ter is not the question of our individual shortcomings 
and faults. It is the question of our relation to God. 
That takes up into itself and regulates the matter of our 

special errors day by day. As one has truthfully said, 
8 



lyo GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 

" As long as the relationship with God is real, — if a man 
is truly born of God, — sinful acts are but accidents. 
They do not touch the essence of the man's being." 
And it is upon the fact and the evidence of this relation 
that God throws us for assurance when we come before 
Him with our accusing hearts. Look at the text again. 
" We know that we are of the truth." How do we know 
it ? Hereby know we that we are of the truth — that we 
have passed from death unto life, that we are born of 
God — by the consciousness of active and sincere love 
for the brethren resting upon and moulded by the love 
of Christ, and showing itself in ministry to our brethren, 
by deed as well as by word. All your assurance before 
God rests on the fact that you are a child of God ; but 
your accusing heart often raises the question about that 
fact, and sets you asking, " Am I a child of God ? " And 
when you bring that question before Him, He throws 
you back on the simple testimony of love. Do you 
love me ? Do you love these other children of mine, 
your brethren ? Do you show that you do by your life 
of ministry ? There is nothing vague or subtle in that. 
It calls for no painful heart-rummaging, no tormenting 
self-analysis. All there is in it you get hold of every 
time you take your little child on your knee and ask, 
" Do you love me ? " Your child can answer without 
hesitation. It knows that it loves you ; though it can- 
not tell why or how. You know whether you love God 
or not. You know whether you love your brethren 01 
not. And that is conclusive evidence. You would not 
and could not love either God or His children as such, 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 



171 



if you were not of Him. " Hereby know we that we are 
of the truth." And so God, who is greater than our 
heart and knoweth all things, refers us to that simple, 
broad test for our assurance of being His children ; and, 
once assured of that, all the rest — love, pardon, compas- 
sion — goes along with it. " God is greater than our 
heart and knoweth all things." I wonder, as I read this 
passage, if John, when he penned it, was thinking of 
that interview of Jesus with Peter by the lake-shore 
after His resurrection. It seems almost as if he must 
have been. There was poor Peter, with a heart which 
throbbed with self-accusation : Peter who had denied 
his Lord and forsaken Him ; and Christ meets all this 
self-accusation with the simple words, " Lovest thou 
me?" Peter is to be an apostle, a leader: to. feed the 
sheep and the lambs ; and yet our Lord throws the 
whole vital matter of Peter's relation to Himself on 
this simple test, Lovest thou me ? And Peter's reply 
is in the very vein of our text. God is greater than 
our heart and knoweth all things. " Lord, Thou know- 
est all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee." 

You observe that John puts this fact of God's omnis- 
cience as a hopeful and comforting fact. The ordinary 
rendering of the verse puts it as a terrible and chilling 
fact, which it is very far from being. Our first instinct, 
perhaps, would be to shrink from bringing our self-accus- 
ing hearts before One who knows all things ; but a very 
little thought will show us that that instinct is false and 
misleading. If you or I were upon trial on some grave 
charge involving our honor or our life, should we be will- 



172 GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 

ing to be tried before an ignorant judge ? Should we not 
say, " The wiser the judge, the better for me" ? It is not 
otherwise when we come to God's bar. Though God's 
holiness shames our sinfulness, though God's perfect wis- 
dom dwarfs our folly, nevertheless the safest refuge for the 
most sinful is perfect holiness ; and perfect knowledge 
joined to perfect love furnishes the strongest assurance 
to trembling and penitent souls. If that knowledge sees 
deeper into our sin than we do, it also sees deeper into 
our weakness. If it weighs the act in more nicely- 
adjusted scales, it knows what circumstances to throw 
into the scales. If it knows our most secret faults, it 
also knows our frame and our frailty. If it discerns 
aggravations, it equally discerns extenuations. Self- 
accusing hearts are nowhere so safe as in God's hands : 
nowhere so sure of justice, but nowhere so sure of ten- 
der mercy. 

I must leave the subject here. The fact of self-accu- 
sation we know from the reproachful whispers of our 
own hearts ; but the apostle comes to us to-day to de- 
fine for us the position and the authority of the heart in 
heaven's chancery : to tell us that its decisions are not 
final, and to bid us take ourselves and our self-accusa- 
tions to that higher court where supreme love and perfect 
wisdom occupy the judgment-seat. If the self-accusation 
is morbid and unfounded, — a freak of diseased religious 
fancy rather than a truthful verdict of a healthful con- 
science, — only before that bar will its fallacy be fully 
exposed, and the heart be assured and quieted. If it is 
just, only by that perfect wisdom will the error be duly 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 



173 



weighed ; only by that perfect love will it be forgiven ; 
only by that perfect strength will the soul be invigor- 
ated to renew with fresh courage the life-long fight 
with sin. If we are trembling lest the things of which 
our hearts accuse us may be the warrant for disinherit- 
ing us of our position and privilege as children of God, 
we are pointed past our individual errors and lapses to 
the great evidence of our relation to God — love. We 
come to the Lord's table to-day, every one of us, with 
some self-accusation. We have been too worldly. We 
have yielded to temptation : we are conscious of an ill- 
developed spirituality and of an intermittent zeal. W r e 
shall meet here nothing to encourage us to continue in 
sin. We shall receive no assurance that sin is any less 
vile than our conscience tells us it is. We shall hear 
nothing which will warrant us in relaxing our vigilance ; 
nothing which will go to make the struggle and the 
fight for holiness less intense. But these symbols 
beckon us away from self. They bid us to cease ag- 
gravating our struggle by self-brooding and introspec- 
tion. They call us to God, the judge of all, who hath 
committed all judgment unto Jesus, the mediator of the 
new covenant. They mark the transfer of the judicial 
element in Christian experience from our own hearts to 
God. They point us from judgment to pardon. They 
urge the accusation of our heart as a reason and a mo- 
tive for the assurance of our heart by some power out- 
side and above itself. They lift up before our eyes Him 
who was manifested that He might take away sin. Thev 
tell us of divine sympathy with the tried and tempted. 



174 



GOD GREATER THAN OUR HEART. 



They lead us up to where the complex and confused 
witness of our ignorant hearts is resolved into the sim- 
ple test of love. You come saying, " My heart condemns 
me. I am so unworthy ; I am an erring child ; I am a 
stubborn, wayward pupil." But O, is there not a deeper 
instinct which presses through all this self-accusation 
upward to your lips and voices itself in Peter's words, 
" Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love 
Thee" ? Let us hold by that. It is the supreme evi- 
dence of our relation to God : and if we are children of 
God, surely in our Father's house we may be sure of all 
help in our struggle, all sympathy with our weakness, 
all pardon for our sin, all grace to help in time of need ; 
yea, sure that, being now children of God, the time will 
come when the self-accusing heart will be forever stilled, 
the possibility of sin forever removed, when we shall be 
like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. 



XII. 

SONSHIP THE FORESHADOWING OF 
HEAVEN. 



11 Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not 
yet made manifest what we shall be. We know 
that if He shall be manifested we shall be like 
Him ; for we shall see Him even as He is. And 
every one that hath this hope set on Him, puri- 
fieth himself eve?i as He is pure. " — i John iii. 2, 3* 

In every true economy of life there is a concealed 
side. This fact grows partly out of the nature of the 
case, and is partly a dictate of wisdom. There is a side 
of your personality, of your business, of your domestic 
life, which ordinary prudence and self-respect forbid you 
to expose to the world. There are also thoughts and 
plans which one man cannot reveal to another, because 
he cannot be understood. There are branches of science 
which the best teacher cannot impart to a child. 

This fact of concealment, and these two reasons for it, 
are both apparent in God's dealing with men. Divine 
revelation is the exposed side of a divine economy which 
reaches back into darkness. " We know in part." Some 
things God could not tell us, because we could not un- 
derstand them. Other things are equally hidden, be- 
cause He does not see fit to reveal them. 

But against this dark side of divine revelation human 

(175) 



i;6 SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 

curiosity and pride are in continual protest ; speculating 
in the absence of knowledge, and complaining because 
more has not been told them, and refusing to accept 
what is revealed, because of what is not revealed. 

God does not ignore nor forbid men's natural curi- 
osity to know what is hidden. In many cases, indeed, 
He uses it in the interest of wider knowledge. The ad- 
vancement of knowledge would come to a stop if all 
men were simply content to accept the unknown as un- 
knowable. At the same time He does set a limit to 
human knowledge in certain directions : but the point 
which you are specially to note is that, in all such cases, 
God puts His revelation in such a relation to what is 
unknown, as to quiet the restlessness of the curious and 
searching spirit when it reaches the limit of knowl- 
edge. And by this I do not mean that He persuades 
the man to resign himself passively to ignorance ; but 
that He teaches him to find in what He does see fit to 
tell him, hints and assurances which stimulate his hope 
and make him content to wait for further revelation. 
For instance, He saw fit to withhold from the Old Tes- 
tament that clear revelation of a future life which came 
in with Christ. We cannot suppose that men in those 
days were not as curious about that subject as we are. 
But while God did not satisfy their curiosity, He set 
them upon a track where they could walk restfully and 
hopefully toward the unknown future. He did not give 
them simple ignorance for a companion. He walked 
with them Himself, and His presence and love and 
providential care assured them that the same oresence 



SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. ijj 

and love and care would be with them beyond the 
grave. And hence we hear the Psalmist saying, " In 
thy presence is fulness of joy. Thou wilt not leave my 
soul to the pit, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy holy one 
to see destruction. Thou wilt show me the path of 
life." When we are about to ascend a high peak, it is 
childish to complain that we cannot see at its foot the 
vast prospect which the summit commands ; but we are 
patient and hopeful and cheerful in knowing that we are 
on the right road to the top. In like manner God is 
not content with arbitrarily limiting our knowledge of 
the future. He puts us on the road to the larger knowl- 
edge. He clothes His revelation with hope. He as- 
sures us concerning what He does not reveal by what 
He does reveal. He gives us certain foreshadowings of 
our future in our present. 

All that we have thus far said is contained and illus- 
trated in our text. We have the concealment, " It 
doth not yet appear what we shall be." We have the 
revelation, " We are now the children of God." We 
have in the revelation a hint of the essential quality of 
the future life. We shall continue to be children of 
God, and our family likeness will be brought out and 
perfected when we shall see Him as He is. Finally, 
we have the practical bearing of these conditions on our 
lives. The hope of perfect likeness to God which our 
consciousness of sonship gives us, acts to make us strive 
for purity of reart, that we may see God. " Every one 
that hath this hope set upon Him, purifieth himself even 

as He is pure." 
8* 



i;8 SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 

Let us take up these points in order. First, the con- 
cealment. Here we have a definite statement : What 
we are to be hereafter is not yet manifested. We need 
not dwell long upon a fact so familiar and so obvious. 
Christ reveals the fact of immortality, gives the promise 
of immortality, but tells us little or nothing about the 
outward conditions of immortality. A Christian must 
frankly accept this ignorance. By the terms of his 
Christian covenant he engages to walk by faith, and not 
by sight. A thousand questions, a thousand specula- 
tions, betray this ignorance. " What is Heaven ? Where 
is Heaven? What is a spiritual body? How shall we 
be employed ? Shall we know each other ? " Litera- 
ture, with its " Little Pilgrim," its " Gates Ajar," its 
Swedenborgian fantasies, tells the same story. Most of 
us construct our heaven, unconsciously, by exaggerating 
the elements of our earthly happiness. The Indian 
pictures it as a happy hunting-ground. The Moham- 
medan as a scene of sensuality. To the toil-worn it is 
a synonym of rest : to the curious, of knowledge : to 
the bereaved, of restoration and reunion : to the sorrow- 
ful, of joy. 

Scripture concedes something to these fancies, as in- 
deed it must if it attempt to picture heaven at all : 
and, besides, they are not wholly fancies. Restlessness, 
toil, sorrow, bereavement, ignorance, are all outgrowths 
of sin, and the Bible promises the abolition of these in 
promising a sinless heaven. Moreover, it gives us ma- 
terial pictures of heavenly glory in its gates of pearl, its 
golden streets, its trees and rivers. That is the very 



Si 



SON SHIP AND HEAVEN. 179 

best our human conditions will admit of its doing for 
us. And yet, after all, the Bible never varies from the 
testimony of this text, — " It doth not yet appear what we 
shall be." " Now we see in a mirror, in a riddle." "We 
know in part." All its formulas of heavenly felicity are 
straitened and vague. " A far more exceeding and eter- 
nal weight of glory ": " eternal life ": " a house not 
made with hands ": " a better country." 

Still, there is revelation as well as concealment. It 
doth not yet appear, but we know something. Thus 
we reach the second element of the text. And as we 
study what is revealed to us, we begin to see that the 
concealment and ignorance which wait on this subject 
are not arbitrary. We have already seen that they are 
to a great extent necessary because of the limitations of 
our intelligence : that God does not reveal, because we 
cannot understand : but it appears, besides, that these 
concealments are in the interest of our knowledge on 
another side, and are intended to direct our researches 
into another and more profitable channel. 

For if we rightly read the New Testament, we find it 
aiming not so much to put us in possession of new facts 
about the future life, as to put us in the right attitude 
alike toward what is revealed and what is hidden. Our 
disposition is to inquire into the circumstances of the 
world to come ; while the Gospel persistently counter- 
acts this tendency by showing us that the future life is 
essentially a matter of character rather than of circum- 
stances. John gives us the key to this truth in our text. 
Notice his words : " It doth not yet appear " — not where 



180 SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 

we shall be, or in what circumstances we shall be, — but 
" it doth not appear what we shall be ": only we know 
that we shall be like God. That is the great, the only 
point which concerns us as respects the future life. To 
be like God will be heaven. To be unlike God will be 
perdition. Character creates its own environment. 

" The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven ! " 

The Gospel lays all the stress there. It assumes that 
if character is Christ-like, its surroundings in heaven 
will be appropriate and congenial. And, accordingly, 
you observe that the circumstances of the eternal life, 
where they are touched on at all, are treated in their 
relation to the great facts of character. Even in the 
material and rhetorical descriptions of the Book of Rev- 
elation the element of personal and social holiness is 
emphasized. The Lamb is the light of the city. His 
servants shall serve Him. There entereth nothing that 
defileth, or that loveth and maketh a lie. The assembly 
is made up of the forgiven. The theme of its song is 
deliverance from sin. 

On this side we know something of the heavenly 
world. We know the moral laws which govern it, for 
they are essentially the same laws which the Gospel 
applies here. We know the moral sentiments which 
pervade heaven. They are the very sentiments which 
the Gospel is seeking to foster in us here. We know 
that holiness which is urged upon us here is the charac- 
ter of God ; and that where a holy God reigns the at- 



SON SHIP AND HEAVEN. 



181 



mosphere must be one of holiness : that if God is love, 
love must pervade heaven ; that if God is truth, truth 
must pervade heaven. 

Now, all this, you see, must exert a tremendous pow- 
er upon the present life, viewed as a prelude and 
preparation for the life to come. If that future life is 
to have its essence in character and not in circumstance, 
it follows that character and not circumstance is the 
great thing here : that the absorbing question for you 
and me, in view of the inevitable future is, What am I ? 
What can I be with God's help ? That our preparation 
for the life to come is to be strictly on the line of char- 
acter. You clearly perceive that, in the present life, 
you prepare for some things with reference to cir- 
cumstances merely. For instance, if you are to be pre- 
sented at the English Court to the Queen, your prepara- 
tion is wholly a matter of circumstance. It is of no con- 
sequence whether you are a good man or a bad one : 
whether you are learned or ignorant. The great thing 
is that you know court etiquette ; that you dress in a 
certain way ; that you bow at the right time ; that you 
do not address the sovereign directly, but only through 
her minister ; and that you retire keeping your face to 
the throne. 

On the other hand, if you are going to meet a com- 
pany of literary and scientific men, it is of very little 
consequence what you wear, or whether you are to ap- 
pear in a palace or in a barn. If that society is to 
have any meaning to you, if you are to get any pleasure 
out of it, your preparation must be in yourself. You 



1 82 SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 

must know something of the subjects discussed. You 
are invited on the presumption that you are a cultivated 
man. Your most brilliant costume, if you are an igno- 
ramus, will only make you a laughing-stock. 

You see then that the apostle strikes directly into this 
track of thought. In the first place he states the fact 
of concealment. Down between our speculations and 
dreams and the eternal reality falls an impenetrable veil. 
It doth not yet appear what we shall be. Even the 
eternal possibilities of holy character are not revealed to 
us, and the circumstances and details of the heavenly 
state are not thought worthy of mention. But he goes 
on to say, " You are on the right road to knowing. You 
are on the right road to becoming. Now are you chil- 
dren of God : that fact enfolds all that is to come. It is 
a matter of character here as in heaven. The true goal 
of your striving is likeness to God. That will be heaven ; 
and the road to that goal is likeness to God here," Be- 
loved, now are we children of God. That implies a 
family likeness. No matter what the likeness may im- 
ply when perfected in heaven. You cannot comprehend 
that now. The human mind cannot grasp the ultimate 
possibilities of holiness. The great thing here and now 
is that you are God's children, moving on in obedience 
and faith and purity of heart toward the serene heights 
of heaven. Two things you know amid all your igno- 
rance : that you are on the right road to the glory that 
is to be revealed, and that, when it shall be revealed, your 
sonship will be consummated in likeness to God, what- 
ever that may include. And if you study John's words 



SON SHIP AND HEAVEN. ^3 

closely, you will see that he chooses them with a nice 
discrimination, so as to bring out this thought with the 
greatest possible force. He says children of God, a phrase 
different from the common one, sons of God, which ex- 
presses a position of privilege, while children of God ex- 
presses community of nature, and consequent promise 
of development. So that very statement, " now are we 
children of God," tells us that even here we share the 
nature of God, and that in that fact lies the promise of 
infinite development, divine manhood, the consummate 
flower of character. Essentially we shall not be other 
there than here. The difference will be in degree, in 
maturity of development. We are children of God here, 
we shall be children of God there. When God makes 
us His children it is not for time merely. Hear these 
words of Peter : " Blessed be the God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy 
begat us again unto a living hope, by the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incor- 
ruptible and undefiled and that fadeth not away, re- 
served in heaven for you." And you know too the 
parallel words of Paul: "If children, then heirs, heirs of 
God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ." 

But we must touch one more point before leaving 
this branch of the subject. Why, with all this promise, 
does it not appear what we shall be? Look at the 
promise itself and you will see the answer. The essence 
of the promise is, we shall be like God. Understand, 
not equal to God, but like God, as the finite, under the 
highest possible conditions, can be like the infinite. The 



1 84 SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 

reason for this likeness to God is given. We shall see 
Him as He is. This gives us the reason why it doth not 
yet appear what we shall be. We do not see Him as He 
is. We cannot so see Him here, any more than a child, in 
the weakness of infancy and the ignorance and perverse- 
ness of childhood, can understand and appreciate the 
mind and character of a noble father. The history of 
humanity has not been a history of clear perception of 
God. On the contrary, strange as it may seem, around 
this vital point, this most important factor of all knowl- 
edge, centre the grossest misconceptions and perversions. 
Ask history what has been man's thought of God, and 
the Oriental fairy-tales cannot furnish a more grotesque 
and horrible group of monstrosities. And even a nine- 
teenth-century Christian, with Christ in the background, 
cannot be said to have a complete or an accurate concep- 
tion of God. I think that, in many cases, it might be much 
fuller and more truthful ; and one reason, perhaps the 
main reason, why it is not, I suspect, is because men re- 
fuse to accept literally the fact that God was manifest in 
Jesus Christ, and to go to Christ to learn what God is. 
They take, instead of this conception, or mix up with it, 
the God of the schools : the God which system-makers 
have pieced together and built up with attributes. 
Christ was given to the world as the most complete 
revelation of God which humanity is capable of com- 
prehending. But even Christ appears in the limitations 
of our humanity. The root of the whole difficulty lies 
in those very limitations. We do not know what we 
shall be, because we cannot know what it is to be like 



SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. ^5 

God. We cannot know what it is to be like God, be- 
cause we cannot see Him as He is, and never shall, until 
He shall be manifested as pure spirit to purified spirits 
freed from the trammels of the flesh. 

And you will further notice the truth which the text 
assumes, that likeness to God comes through vision of 
God. We know that truth already in its earthly mani- 
festations. We assimilate to that which we habitually 
contemplate, and especially so when we contemplate 
lovingly and enthusiastically. The affectionate child 
takes on the characteristics of the parent whom he 
loves. Love has a power of transformation. A be- 
loved object draws into its own moulds. Even ma- 
terial things with which one has habitually to do, set 
their mark upon him. The man who is working with 
matter on a large scale, who is projecting great struct- 
ures or handling vast financial interests, takes on larger 
proportions than one who deals with petty things. And 
so the man who contemplates God, who sets Him al- 
ways before his face, who looks upon Him as the su- 
preme object of love, grows into the likeness of God ; 
and such is the testimony of Jesus himself, as He ad- 
dresses the Father in that wonderful prayer in the 
seventeenth of John : " This is life eternal, that they 
should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom 
Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." 

Thus we come naturally to the third and last point of 
our text — the practical duty growing out of this mixed 
condition of ignorance and promise. For if the promise 
is to be fulfilled in likeness to God, if that, in short, is 



1 86 SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 

to constitute our heaven, and if that promise is enfolded 
in our present relation as children of God, then we have 
in that fact both a consolation and an exhortation to 
duty. The consolation lies in the fact that though it doth 
not yet appear what being like God means, yet we are 
on the right road to knowing in being children of God. 
The gardener does not know what will be the exact 
color and size of the ripened peach or pear, but he 
knows that the consummate result of ripeness is in that 
hard green pellet ; and he guards the pellet from care- 
less hands and wind and hail. In the fact of being 
children of God is contained the promise of likeness to 
God. The assimilation begins here. The outlines are 
faint, but they are real. The perfection of the ransomed 
and glorified spirit is foreshadowed in the first outlines 
of character in a child of God. 

And, therefore, the whole practical duty of life con- 
centrates itself upon maintaining and developing this 
condition of sonship. If you would see God as He is 
and be like Him, bend all your energies to being a true 
and loyal child of God here and now. You shall win 
the best of heaven by getting the best there is out of 
your position and relation as a child of God here. This 
is the logic of the Gospel. Like Him, for we shall see 
Him as He is. But who shall see Him as He is ? 
Christ makes answer : " Blessed are the pure in heart ; 
they shall see God." What then ? John comes in say- 
ing, " Every one that hath this hope in Him — this hope 
of being like Him — purifieth himself, even as He is pure." 
This is our great business here, my brethren, if we have 



SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 187 

any well-grounded hope of seeing God and of winning 
heaven. Sonship does not stop with mere relationship. 
The relationship gets its real meaning in the character 
of each individual child. It makes little difference who 
a man's father was, provided the man himself does not 
signify. The real essence of sonship is not physical, but 
moral. You remember how slightingly John, the Bap- 
tist treated the matter of mere physical descent when 
the Pharisees and Sadducees came to his baptism. 
" Think not to say within yourselves, ' We have Abra- 
ham to our father/ for I say unto you that God is able 
of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 
Bring forth fruits meet for repentance." And our Lord 
followed up the words to the Jews when they boasted 
of being Abraham's seed : " I know that ye are Abra- 
ham's seed, yet ye seek to kill me because my word 
hath not free course in you. If ye were Abraham's 
children ye would do the works of Abraham." And 
when they asserted that God was their father, He an- 
swered, " If God were your Father ye would love me." 
So that this text does not allow us merely to stand 
upon sonship as on a mount of vision, and felicitate our- 
selves on good things to come. Sonship completes it- 
self in duty and in matured holiness of character. Hope 
in God means faith in God, love to God, obedience to 
God. We have something to do in this matter of like- 
ness to God. Only God can purify the heart, but He 
enlists our service in purifying the life. In the same 
breath Paul tells us that God worketh in us to will and 
to work for His own pleasure, and bids us carry out our 



1 88 SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 

own salvation. Every one that hath this hope in God 
is purified by the Holy Spirit, yet our text says " puri- 
fieth himself/' Personal devotion calls out personal 
effort. If we want heaven we must work for it. If we 
are to be true children of God we shall not become such 
by merely saying, like the Jews, that God is our Father. 
If sonship does not mean to us a fight with impurity, 
a study of the law of God and of the character of Christ, 
obedience, self-denial, fidelity, it is only a name. 

But, oh, what a stimulus is there in this fact of son- 
ship ! Let us sit down, and in the light of this text 
ponder this ultimate meaning of sonship — likeness to 
God through perfect vision of God. We find the hard 
problem of life just at this point : to make sonship a 
moral reality, to be worthy sons of such a Father. How 
far short we come. How feeble seems our striving. 
What slow progress we make. How discouraged we be- 
come when we compare ourselves with Christ ; but the 
case is not hopeless, any more than the greenness and 
hardness of the unripe fruit is hopeless. Sonship en- 
folds heaven. If we are children of God, we hold in 
that fact the promise of eternal life ; of a state where 
this unlikeness to God which pains and worries us here, 
shall disappear in the perfect vision of God, and we 
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. How 
many of God's earnest souls have cheered themselves on 
their weary way with this thought. I know of no one 
who has given it an expression more nearly akin to in- 
spiration than that poor Methodist shoemaker, Thomas 
Olivers : 



SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. jgg 

u The God of Abraham praise 

Who reigns enthroned above ; 
Ancient of everlasting days, 

And God of love ; 
Jehovah, great I Am ! 

By earth and heaven confessed ; 
I bow, and bless the sacred name 

Forever blessed. 

" The God of Abraham praise, 

At whose supreme command 
From earth I rise, and seek the joys 

At His right hand ; 
I all on earth forsake, 

Its wisdom, fame, and power ; 
And Him my only portion make, 

My shield and tower. 

" The. God of Abraham praise, 

Whose all-sufficient grace 
Shall guide me all my happy days 

In all His ways ; 
He calls a worm His friend, 

He calls Himself my God ! 
And He shall save me to the end, 

Through Jesus' blood. 

1 He by Himself hath sworn ; 

I on His oath depend ; 
I shall on eagles' wings upborne 

To heaven ascend ; 
I shall behold His face, 

I shall His power adore, 
And sing the wonders of His grace 

For evermore." 

And so, like all Scriptural contemplation of heaven, 
this text turns our thought from future glory to present 
duty ; from victory to conflict. We may comfort our- 
selves with hope. We may refresh our souls with the 



190 



SONSHIP AND HEAVEN. 



assurance of likeness to God by and by ; but the great 
thing now is to strive to be true and loyal sons of God 
here in this world ; to purify ourselves as He is pure. 
May God help us in the struggle, and bring us all at last 
to behold His face in peace. 



XIII. 

THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 

"The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all 
that be bowed down" — Psalm cxlv. 14. 

THE Bible, being a book for humanity, is a book for 
the weak, the fallible, and the disappointed. A large 
part of it is devoted to the erring and the unsuccessful. 
Take its biographies. How many do you find of perfect 
men ? Were Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Elijah, Job 
faultless, and always strong and triumphant ? Does 
James speak any less than the truth when he says of 
Elijah that he was a man of like passions with ourselves ? 
Every one of these biographies is a story of a faultful 
man. Then, so much of its counsel and warning is 
directed at servants of God and disciples of Christ. Not 
only guide-posts, but danger-signals, are set up all along 
the way of life. It was to His own disciples that Christ 
said, " Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation. 
The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." 

By far the larger part of its promises is to the sorrow- 
ful and afBicted and disappointed. When Christ invited 
the weary and heavy-laden to rest, He invited a restless 
and burdened world. When the Bible addresses the 
strong it is to point them to the true source of their 
strength, to warn them against presuming on their own 

(191) 



1 92 THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 

wisdom, and to commend the weak to their sympathy 
and helpfulness. The whole matter is summed up in 
the Psalmist's statement of God's attitude toward His 
children at large. It is that of pity based on knowledge 
of their infirmity. " The Lord pitieth them that fear 
Him, for He knoweth our frame and remembereth that 
we are dust." 

Strange that we cannot see it as God does, and yet 
the world at large does not see it. Is it not the general 
impression that the Bible is a book for a select circle of 
strong and victorious saints — for men who are above 
human passions and temptations and errors ? That 
God is the God of the morally successful ? That if a 
frail, faultful, passion-racked son of earth does, by any 
chance, touch the hem of His royal robe and get a word 
of comfort or pity, the word is a morsel tossed from the 
table where the elect feast ? 

And yet, if the popular impression be the right one, 
the world is in evil case. I appeal to experience. What 
does your observation certify as to the number of those 
who are too successful, and too independent of the con- 
ditions of this life to need help and comfort ? Do you 
know any house which has not its sorrow ? Do you 
know anybody who has not his trouble ? I once heard 
one of the most honored and eloquent ministers of this 
city say that he had labored, for nearly forty years, largely 
among the so-called prosperous classes, and knew scarce- 
ly a house where there was not a grief or a burden. 
Even in the world's sense of the word, how many are 
the successful men ? How many get even a foothold ? 



THE GOD OF THE UXSUCCESSFUL. 193 

Compare the successes with the disappointments. Do 
you think the number is small of the men who carry 
about with them at the bottom of their hearts the feel- 
ing, " I have not succeeded in proportion to my effort, 
nor so well as I have deserved " ? Whatever power rules 
the world, seems to have a strange indifference to men's 
deserts, or what they conceive to be such. What be- 
comes of all the failures ? What becomes of the vast 
mass of honest work which seerns to count for nothing 
and end in nothing so far as we can see ? The waste of 
nature which, of fifty seeds often brings but one to bear, 
has its parallel in the realm of human striving. 

Or, morally and religiously, how many perfect men 
and women do you know ? How many who never 
swerve ? We have a high ideal, and it is well that we 
should have, for we are the better for it even if we do 
not reach it. The old saying runs, that he who aims at 
the sun shoots farther than he who aims at the ground. 
We have in our minds a picture of a life flowing on 
with a steadily deepening and broadening current, calm 
and majestic up to the moment when it empties into 
eternity. Possibly we read of such lives in romances : 
but have you ever known one ? Does any one of you 
know himself as such an one ? Is it not rather your 
worry and your burden that you have been slipping and 
falling all along in the pursuit of your ideal, and that 
you are still so far from it ? That your easily-besetting 
sin comes upon you again and again, and will not stay 
conquered ? Good friend, if the Bible and the God of the 
Bible are for the strong and the unsoiled only, I must 
9 



1 94 THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 

needs say that your case is not hopeful. If the principle 
of natural selection — the survival of the fittest — is to be 
rigidly carried out in the spiritual as in the natural world, 
the result must be an infinitesimal remnant. Heaven 
will not need to be a great city, nor will it need twelve 
gates. 

Now you see that the Bible does not fit into any such 
conception as this. Nine-tenths of it is useless if this is 
a truthful statement of the case. On its very face it is 
for the many. The picture of heaven drawn by John 
is a picture of a great multitude which no man can 
number, whose song tells of sin and sorrow in the old 
life : who came up out of great tribulation and must 
needs wash the soil of earth from their garments. The 
Bible does not find its true place until it strikes a weak, 
fallible, sinful world. That moment it is at home and 
busy. 

The ancients had an idea that God was the God of 
the successful. The very word which the Greeks used 
to denote a prosperous man, meant a man who had a 
deity for a patron. The idea is truthful at the root, if 
we couple with it a right definition of prosperity. But 
what they did not get hold of was the truth that a man 
might be under the tutelage of a good god, and yet be 
an unsuccessful and unfortunate man as the world goes. 
To the Hebrews, worldly prosperity was a synonym for 
divine favor. The good man should have fields and cat- 
tle, and abundance of corn and wine. To be poor and 
wretched and disfigured was to be smitten of God, and 
implied sinfulness. Jesus himself fell under that re- 



THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 



195 



proach. That was the sore trouble of Job. That no- 
tion was so rooted in the popular theology, that when a 
man like Job, who had lived in conspicuous piety and 
integrity, whom the eye blessed when it beheld, and 
who made the widow's heart sing for joy, — when such 
a man lost his cattle and his home and his children, and 
came under the power of a loathsome disease, the pious 
men of his acquaintance leaped at once to the conclusion 
that he had been living in secret sin, and had drawn 
upon him God's wrath therefor. And Job, being him- 
self under the power of the same popular falsehood, 
was in agony over the problem raised by his affliction. 

Now our text this morning gives us distinctly this 
truth — a truth most precious and full of comfort, be- 
cause it is a truth which comes home to us all — that 
God is the God of those who fall and are bowed down : 
God is the God of the unsuccessful. " The Lord up- 
holdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all that be bowed 
down." 

I speak, as the Psalmist does, of men and to men who 
recognize and honor the law of God, and are honestly 
striving to keep His laws. The words do not apply to 
the indolent who interpret the invitation to cast their 
care on God as a " permit " to cast off all care about 
their own souls and lives. They do not apply to those 
who are indifferent to God and who wilfully defy His 
law. The Psalmist settles that in a single verse. " The 
Lord preserveth all them that love Him, but all the 
wicked will He destroy." He will not uphold them. I 
am speaking then to you who honor God : who are 



196 the god of the unsuccessful. 

making an honest fight for the truth and the right : who 
are trying to keep your lives pure and to make them use- 
ful. I know that you fall as I do, and are often bowed 
down. I know that you are not all successes, either from 
a worldly or a religious point of view. I know that the 
way in which God leads you is often a dark and a hard 
way. I know that in more than one thing on which you 
have asked God's blessing, you have failed, at least as we 
conceive of failure. I know that you are not as good as 
you would like to be, and that conscience says to many 
of you that you are not as good as you ought to be ; 
and I think it highly probable. I know that you are 
not without faith and honest purpose, but that you are 
heart-sore and self-reproached, some of you, because you 
have made head so slowly against your besetments and 
have been so often taken prisoner by them. 

Now you will surely not understand me to be counsel- 
ling you to make yourselves easy about such things, and 
to give up your hard fight with temptation, when I say 
that, in spite of all this, because of all this, God is on 
your side. You are saying sorrowfully to yourself, " I 
am not a success as a religious man or woman." I re- 
ply, God is on your side — the God who hates sin, and 
who fails in nothing — not to make you content with fail- 
ure, but to make you a success. He is interested in you 
personally, as His child and servant : in you, an erring, 
falling, bowed-down man or woman ; and that is why He 
upholds and raises you up. 

I am very sure that you cannot study the life of Jesus, 
who always exhibits to us the feeling and the dealing of 



THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 



197 



God himself, without seeing that the weight of His sym- 
pathy is with the losers in life's battle. He was the 
friend of Mary Magdalene, but He had cast seven devils 
out of her. Zacchaeus, poor, little, despised tax-gather- 
er, — He went to his house as a guest, and that one act 
made a man of him. That crowd of sick, squalid, filthy, 
blind and lame, He was their friend, and left His mark 
on many a restored limb and on the opened window of 
many a curtained eye. The man in the porch at Bethesda 
could get no one to put him into the healing waters; 
but Jesus did for him what the pool could not. The 
woman whom they wanted to stone, the Syrophenician 
whom the disciples found troublesome, she who an- 
ointed and wept over His feet — Jesus was on their side : 
unsuccessful people they were too. And, in His para- 
bles, you see readily which way His heart goes. It is 
not to the proper son, who, though he had stayed at home 
and not wasted his substance, had a slave's heart in 
him ; but to the vagabond who had fed with the swine 
and had come penitently home in rags. It is to that 
lost sheep rather than to the ninety-and-nine which went 
not astray. 

Nov/, first, in relation to your worldly affairs. Some- 
how, perhaps, you have gotten undermost in the fight. 
You have not obtained what you wanted. You have 
stumbled and fallen in the path which you thought would 
lead you to success and victory. Well, look at the text. 
The figure, as you can all see, is that of a man who has 
fallen down in the road. This good friend lifts him up 
and sets him on his feet. The text does not say that he 



1 98 THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 

puts him in a royal chariot and bears him smoothly on 
nor even that he gives him the thing he was after, as a 
foolish parent gives a child the sweetmeat for which he 
cries. He lifts him up, upholds him. It is something 
to be put on your feet, my friend. Something to be 
able to walk, if not in the direction you were going, yet 
in some other and possibly better direction. Something 
that God does not take from you the power of carrying 
out your own salvation. You see, God is not caring now 
for your glory : not concerned with your getting just 
what you want : He is caring for your walking. Your 
business in this world, now, is to walk. The glory is 
farther on. If you ever reach it, it will be by God's 
way, not by your own. So He does the best of all things 
for you if He puts you on your feet and helps you to 
walk in His way. It is the steps of a good man that are 
ordered. The Word throws less light upon reward than 
upon duty. Enough indeed to stimulate duty, but the 
Word is a lamp unto the feet and a light unto the path. 
Paul says, summing up the result of the life-battle, 
" Having done all to stand." O merciful, wise, tender 
love, which, even while it denies what we long for, bends 
over us while we lie prone and weeping over our disap- 
pointment, and sets us on our feet again and bids us fol- 
low God and not the devices and desires of our own 
hearts. 

And, I repeat, He may thus set us on our feet that 
we may walk another way from that on which we were 
going. The fall may be a blessing in disguise, a moni- 
tion to abandon that way. Many a man has found 



THE GOD OF THE UXSUCCESSFUL. 



199 



that to give up the thing he desired and take some- 
thing less and lower, was not a sorrow after all. I remem- 
ber how I started out one morning, under the bright 
Italian sky, to climb a summit which it was said com- 
manded a wonderful prospect. For awhile the road 
was smooth and plain. Then I lost my way, and wan- 
dered off along the sheep-tracks, and came at last to the 
bottom of a grassy ravine, at the top of which, and 
seemingly not far off, was the hermitage toward which I 
was working. But I could not reach it. The descent 
was steep, and my feet slipped on the smooth grass, and 
I was alone, and my strength failed. I had to give it 
up. And then I sat down on that lower shoulder of 
the mountain, and found that I had not climbed in vain. 
Such a vision of beauty lay beneath and around me — hill 
and forest and lake and distant peak and sapphire sky. 
Probably the view from the summit was wider and 
grander, but the view from the lower slope was worth 
the climb and the weariness. 

Or, suppose God means to admonish you by your fall 
to go more slowly after your desire. Because, even 
when men desire a good thing, they may go too fast 
after it. " He that believeth shall not make haste." I 
submit that God gives you a blessing in simply uphold- 
ing you, and letting you walk on at a more moderate 
pace. Possibly there are things on the road which you 
ought to note, but which you would miss by going too 
fast. A man who goes leisurely through a country, sees 
a great deal more of its characteristics than one who 
rushes through in a train to accomplish something in a 



200 THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 

distant city. God will not let us pursue one remote end 
to the neglect of all that lies by the wayside. Success 
in life is not the gaining of that one end at the end. It 
is the right adjustment to all that lies in the track of 
each day. So God lets you walk, upholds you, teaches 
you to walk. He is doing you a greater service by up- 
holding you, so that you can move on and win the 
strength and discipline and experience which come 
through walking circumspectly, than if He had let you 
go straight to the thing you coveted and sit down and 
enjoy that. Disappointment need not mean wreck. It 
will not if God is in it. God sometimes upholds and 
raises by means of a disappointment. There is a lift in 
that ugly thing. You and I have known men whose 
usefulness and power began with their fall in their 
chosen path. Failure brings our plans and desires down 
in an unsightly heap, and yet on that very heap one 
may stand and reach up to something better. A teacher 
of natural science and mathematics was thrown off his 
self-appointed course of lectures and classes, but Scot- 
land and her poor won through that the ministry of 
Thomas Chalmers. Frederick Robertson wanted to be 
a soldier, but that brief ministry at Brighton has been 
more to England and America than the most brilliant 
military career. Saul of Tarsus had a bad fall on his 
way to Damascus ; but the world has Paul the Christian 
apostle instead of Saul the persecutor. Disappoint- 
ment, like fire, has a double power. It may scorch and 
blast a man, but it may thaw out his blood and quicken 
his life. 



THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 2 0I 

I repeat, failure is not wreck if God is in it ; and some- 
times it seems as if God's policy toward a man is to keep 
him down, and yet keep him walking and working. That 
develops the highest type of moral heroism. If the 
truth were known, there is more heroism under the 
world's failures than under its successes. It is a higher 
and greater thing for an unsuccessful and disappointed 
man to keep rising from his failures and to struggle on 
his way leaning on God's hand to the very end, than for 
him to succeed before the world. God has a testimony 
to bear to the world through His sons and daughters no 
less than to them ; and He bears that testimony most 
emphatically in showing the world that His hand can 
keep a man a man, with an honest soul and a persistent 
purpose in him, amid all his falls and disappointments. 
Sorrow was so representative of Jesus' life that Scripture 
itself calls Him a man of sorrows. Ninety-nine wise 
men out of a hundred, standing by the cross, would 
have said that those thirty-three years of His life and 
ministry were a failure ; and yet the cross is to-day the 
symbol of victory. Success and failure ! Ah ! let us 
not be too hasty in pronouncing upon them. Sorrow 
and disappointment have stony kernels and grow in hard 
soils, and are, therefore, of slow growth. The fruit 
comes and ripens late. The palm, the tree of victory, 
runs up a good many feet before it breaks into leaf. 
This life does not put the seal on success or failure. 
The words have a different meaning in God's lexicon 
from that which we give them here. Our dictionaries 
in that, as in a good many other points, will undergo a 



202 THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 

very radical revision in the light of eternity. I know 
we shall be surprised, if we ever reach heaven, at the 
number of people there who on earth were never thought 
worth minding. I doubt not we shall meet on the very 
threshold more than one who passed for a miserable 
failure in this world, and shall have to search long for 
some who went out of the world encompassed by the 
halo of success. The poor in spirit, the meek, the per- 
secuted — the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. The 
world saw only their failure : God saw their fidelity. 
We must wait until those gates open before we fully 
know who have succeeded and who have failed. Mean- 
while the true course for us is to take the stumbling and 
bowing down into our life as part of it, and to learn to 
look only at our walk and at the hand which upholds 
and guides us in it. 

And as to the matter of Christian experience and the 
falls and stumblings which are along that line, — I 
know, as I have already said, that the ideal which at 
once beckons and reproaches us is that of a steady 
growth in faith and love and goodness and Christian 
power. It is the true ideal too. Let us never lower it : 
never cease striving for it. Let us never admit to our- 
selves that yielding to temptation is anything less than 
sin : that sin is other than vile. Only as a fact, we do 
see that Christians are human as well as other men, and 
that they stumble and fall like other men. The differ- 
ence between a Christian and a man of the world does 
not lie in stumbling or not stumbling, but in the whole 
attitude of the man toward his stumbles and falls. It 



THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 203 

would be strange indeed if the man who sets himself to 
fight his way to heaven in the face of such a world as 
this and of the whole spiritual power of darkness, should 
not now and then fall into a snare or receive a blow that 
brings him to the ground. God nowhere promises that 
a believer shall walk straight on with upright carriage 
and serene front, compassed with the calm of holiness 
all the way to heaven. He tells him rather that Chris- 
tian life is a wrestle. What he is specially concerned 
about, the point where He brings His own divine forces 
into the field, is the way in which the man shall bear 
himself in this struggle. He does promise that sin shall 
not have dominion over him : that though he struggles 
all the way to heaven, and marks his progress with a 
series of falls, he shall mark it also with a series of ris- 
ings, and shall fall and rise and struggle through to vic- 
tory. " Sin shall not have dominion over you." God 
will bring him at last, a saved man, out of the soil and 
the bruises. He will uphold him, not in sinning, but in 
the fight with sin. But this promise is to the honest- 
hearted, to the man who goes bravely and trustfully 
into the fight with all its certainties of blow and down- 
fall. Even worse than a moral fall is the hopelessness 
which keeps a man from rising out of it : the faint- 
heartedness which makes him the victim of a fall instead 
of the victor over it : the fatal blunder which makes him 
say, " God is against me because I have fallen ": the 
spiritual paralysis which keeps him lying face-downward 
in the mire. You are a Christian, but you are a fallible, 
stumbling man or woman. You confess it to yourself. 



204 



THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 



Tried by the high ideal of the Gospel, you are not a re- 
ligious success, only trying hard to be. That is the sav- 
ing clause. God is on the side of the unsuccessful but 
honestly-striving. You find in yourself a constant tend- 
ency to stumble. God meets that with the promise 
of the text — " The Lord upholdeth all that fall and 
raiseth up all those that are bowed down." He is on 
the side, not of the sin, but of its victim. If Satan 
desires to sift you as wheat, Christ prays for you. He 
is bent, not on raising up you and your sin together, but 
on raising you out of your sin and making you a man in 
Christ Jesus in spite of your temptation and weakness. 
He knows well enough that your fight is a hard one. 
He has measured the power of Satan better than you 
have. He knows it is even mightier than you know it 
to be, sorely though you feel it. 

Take courage, then. The great thing for you is that 
God is on your side. Try your best to walk without 
falling. Lean heavily on His hand. Keep your eye on 
Him : keep your purpose steadfast to overcome the 
world. When the falls do come, think only of that 
hand and grasp it. When conscience tells you you are 
not what you should be, and reproaches you for what 
you are, say, " With God's help I will get farther from 
what I am, and nearer to what I ought to be. I can do 
all things through Christ which strengtheneth me ; and 
as for life's failures and disappointments, if He see fit 
to disappoint me, it is still His hand in the disappoint- 
ment, His hand that raiseth up them that are bowed 
down." 



THE GOD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL. 205 

" And I, who wait His coming, shall not I 
On His sure word rely ? 
So, if sometimes the way be rough, and sleep 
Be heavy for the grief He sends to me, 
Let me be mindful that these things must be 
To work His blessed will until He come, 
And take my hand and lead me safely home. " 



XIV. 

MAIMING AND LIFE. 

" And if thy hand cause thee to stumble, cut it off : it 
is good for thee to enter into life maimed, rather 
than having thy two hands to go into hell, into 
the unquenchable fire" — Mark ix. 43. 

THE New Testament revisers have rightly substituted 
the words " cause to stumble " for " offend "; for the 
popular conception of " offend " is misleading. By of- 
fending, we commonly understand doing or saying 
something which is annoying or distasteful to another, 
but not necessarily hurtful. The word in the New 
Testament habitually implies something dangerous. 
That which offends, in the Gospel sense, may be neither 
annoying nor distasteful. On the contrary, it may be 
agreeable and seductive. When Paul speaks of "meat" 
as an offence to a brother, he does not mean that our 
brother's dislike of meat is to give the law to our eating. 
He says, " If meat make my brother stumble," — if my 
eating or drinking, or any other act, cause harm to my 
brother, or help to make him do wrong, — " then I will eat 
no meat." The common interpretation has tended to 
convert the weak brother into a tyrant, to set him up on 
his weakness as on a throne, from which his likings or 

scruples are to dictate to others. 
(206) 



MAIMING AND LIFE. 207 

It is evident, therefore, that our Lord, in these appar- 
ently hard words about cutting off and maiming, is not 
speaking of things which are simply troublesome ; for, 
as a fact, we see that, in God's moral economy, a good 
many troublesome things are retained as permanent fac- 
tors of life. Self-sacrifice, continuous vigilance, cross- 
bearing, hard duty, are all troublesome things, yet they 
enter into every genuine Christian life ; while, on the 
other hand, it is evident that a good many agreeable 
and fascinating things are of the character of stumbling- 
blocks, and require to be taken out of the way. 

The truth here stated by Christ appears to be, I re- 
peat, a very severe and cruel one. It is simply that 
maiming enters into the development of life, and is a 
part of the process through which one attains eternal 
life. Let us look the truth in the face. We may find, 
before we shall have done with it, that it is not so cruel, 
after all. 

Now, there is an aspect in which we all recognize and 
accept this truth ; namely, on the side where it is related 
to our ordinary human life. No life is developed into 
perfection without cutting off something. I am speak- 
ing, you understand, without reference to moral or 
spiritual growth. I mean simply that no man ever at- 
tains a strong and well-rounded manhood without re- 
pressing and limiting and extinguishing certain natural 
tendencies ; without forbidding certain appetites to in- 
dulge themselves ; without setting a gateless wall round 
many things which crave boundless liberty. Sometimes 
these limitations are self-applied ; sometimes they are im- 



208 MAIMING AND LIFE. 

posed by authority. The natural tendencies of the boy 
are to play and eat and sleep. Left to themselves, those 
things will fill up the space allotted to thought and cul- 
ture, so that they must be controlled and restricted. The 
law indeed holds, from a point below human life, that 
every higher thing costs ; that it is won by the abridg- 
ment or suppression of something lower. The corn of 
wheat must die in order to bring forth fruit. The seed- 
life and the seed-form must go, so that the " full corn in 
the ear " may come. This fact of limitation goes along 
with the entire process of human education. The man 
who aims at eminence in any one department of life 
must close the gates which open into other departments. 
In order to be a successful merchant, he must abridge 
the pleasures of literary culture. He may have equally 
strong affinities for medicine and for law, but he cannot 
become a successful lawyer without cutting off the studies 
and the associations which go to make a successful doc- 
tor. And success in any sphere necessitates his cutting 
off a large section of self-indulgence. He must sacrifice 
pleasant leisure and pleasant society, and needful rest 
and recreation. 

Moreover, it is true that men love life so much that 
they will have it at the expense of maiming. A man 
will leap from the third story of a burning house, and 
will take the chance of going through life with a crippled 
limb or a distorted face, rather than stay and be burned 
or suffocated. " All that a man hath will he give for his 
life." Maecenas, the prime minister of the first Roman 
emperor, said that he preferred life with the anguish of 



MAIMING AND LIFE. 



209 



crucifixion to death. Where is the man who will not lie 
down on the surgeon's table, and have his right hand 
cut off or his right eye plucked out rather than die ? 
The most helpless cripple, the blind man, the mutilated 
and disfigured man, will say, " It is better for us to live 
maimed than to die." So that, on one side at least, the 
truth is not so unfamiliar or so cruel, after all. It repre- 
sents, not an arbitrary decree, but a free choice. Men's 
love of life dominates their fear of maiming. Were it 
not so, the annals of suicide would be overcrowded. 
Who would willingly bear the suffering and humiliation 
which wait on physical mutilation, 

" When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin ? " 

Now, our Lord leads us up into the region of spiritual 
and eternal life, and confronts us with the same alterna- 
tive. Cut off anything, sacrifice anything, be maimed 
and crippled so far as this life is concerned, rather than 
forfeit eternal life. 

Life in God's kingdom, like life in the kingdom of 
nature and sense, involves a process of education and 
discipline. A part of this discipline is wrought through 
the agency of the man himself ; that is, by the force of 
his own renewed will. A part of it is brought to bear 
on him from without, through no agency of his own. 
And here, as elsewhere, development implies limitation, 
suppression, cutting off. It is hard to conceive why any 
one should be surprised at this feature of the Gospel 
economy, when it is so clearly recognized and so frankly 



210 MAIMING AND LIFE. 

accepted elsewhere. In our dealing with nature and 
with man, we never leave them wholly to themselves. 
We must limit both on certain sides or mischief ensues. 
Fire and water must not be left to follow the law of 
their nature. A horse is not allowed to roam the plains 
at will. His nature does not incline him to the rein or 
to the saddle ; but these restraints must be applied if 
he is to be made useful. And, in proportion as man's 
nature is nobler than the beast's, his powers greater and 
more varied, and the range of his passions wider, the 
greater are his possibilities of mischief and of degenera- 
tion, and the more necessary is this law of limitation, 
especially in view of his possibilities as an heir of eter- 
nal life. 

Accordingly, the New Testament is full of this. Paul 
puts it as a crucifixion. " I am crucified to the world." 
He puts it as death. " Ye are dead, and your life is hid 
with Christ in God." A whole economy of life, the 
fleshly, sensual, worldly economy, goes by the board 
when Christ takes the soul in charge. " How shall we 
that are dead to sin live any longer therein ? " The 
higher life costs. It can subsist only at the expense of 
the lower. " No man can serve two masters." The men 
who have achieved Christlike character and success have 
done so at cost. The knife has been upon every one 
of those lives. What did Jesus mean when He said 
that His follower must hate father and mother and kin- 
dred? Surely not that Christian life is to annihilate 
natural affection ; and yet it was quite possible that de- 
votion to Christ might require a man to shut his heart 



MAIMING AND LIFE. 2 I1 

to the appeals of natural affection. It might be, it often 
was, that to take Christ's part was to give up all part in 
the affection of father or brother. One might be com- 
pelled to turn his back on them as really as a son who 
hated them. 

Is that an unfamiliar fact ? Have you never known 
a woman on whom the door of her father's house was 
closed from the moment that she went out of it w T ith the 
husband of her choice, and who gave herself to him, 
knowing that, in taking his part, she was cutting off and 
casting from her parental sympathy and all the dear 
associations of childhood ? In our great civil war, was 
it not true that many a man, by taking a side, became 
an outcast to those whom he had loved best ? Has it 
not been so in all the great issues of history? In Christ's 
own day, and much more in the early days of the Church, 
that happened again and again which Christ's words had 
foreshadowed. He who went after the despised Gali- 
lean or His apostles, must forfeit home and friends and 
social standing, and be called an ingrate and a traitor. 
He could not keep father and mother and old asso- 
ciates who hated his Master. They would be only 
stumbling-blocks to him ; and he must therefore cut 
them off, and go after Christ maimed on that side of his 
life. There never was a man who had a finer opportu- 
nity of success, speaking as men speak, than Paul had. 
He sums up the factors of this success in his Philippian 
letter — his descent, his legal strictness, his zeal — and yet 
he cut them off. " What things were g^.in to me, those 
I counted loss for Christ." 



212 MAIMING AND LIFE: 

Few can stand unmoved in the chapel of Merton 
College, at Oxford, before that tablet which bears the 
name of John Coleridge Pattieson, and his sculptured 
figure stretched upon a drifting canoe, with a palm-branch 
between the folded hands. I know few records of mis- 
sionary devotion more touching and beautiful than the 
story of that young and finely-endowed minister, cheer- 
fully relinquishing a home of wealth and culture, the 
society of doting relatives, and the prospect of congenial 
work in the Church in England, and going out to spend 
his days among the savages of the Pacific islands, and to 
fall a victim to their heathen rage in the prime of his 
manhood. Here is a significant passage from one of 
his letters, which shows what cutting-off meant to him : 
" I must forget myself, and think only of the work 
whereunto I am called. But it is hard to flesh and blood 
to think of the pain I am causing my dear father, and 
the pain I am causing to others outside my own circle 
here. There will be seasons of loneliness and sadness, 
and it seems to me as if it was always so in the case of 
all the people of whom we read in the Bible. Our Lord 
distinctly taught His disciples to expect it to be so, 
and even experienced this sorrow of heart Himself, fill- 
ing up the full measure of His cup of bitterness. So I 
don't learn that I ought exactly to wish it to be other- 
wise, so much is said in the Bible about being made par- 
taker of His sufferings : only I pray that it may please 
God to bear me up in the midst of it." 

This text tells us that this cutting off and casting 
away must be our own act. " If thy hand cause thee 



MAIMING AND LIFE. 213 

to stumble, cut it off,"— thou thyself. We are not to 
presume on God's taking away from us whatever is hurt- 
ful. Our spiritual discipline does not consist in merely 
lying still and being pruned. That must do for a vine 
or a tree, but not for a living will. The surrender of 
that must be a self-surrender. The forced surrender of 
a will is no surrender. The necessary abridgment or 
limitation must enlist the active co-operation of the 
man who is limited. " Ye are God's husbandry," says 
Paul ; but, almost in the same breath, he says, " Ye are 
God's fellow-workers." 

There are, however, two aspects in which this self- 
cutting is to be viewed. On the one hand, there is, as 
just noted, something which the man is to do by his 
own will and act. On the other hand, there is a certain 
amount of limitation applied directly by God, without 
the man's agency. In this latter case, the man makes 
the cutting off his own act by cheerful acceptance of 
his limitations. Let us look at each of these two aspects 
in turn. 

In Christian experience, one soon discovers certain 
sides on which it is necessary to limit himself ; certain 
things which he must renounce. The things are not the 
same for all men. They are not necessarily evil things 
in themselves, but a sensitive and well-disciplined con- 
science soon detects certain matters which it is best to 
lay violent hands upon. Another conscience may not 
fix upon the same points ; but to this conscience they 
are stumbling-blocks, hindrances to spiritual growth, in- 
consistent with entire devotion to Christ. It is enough 



214 MAIMING AND LIFE. 

that they are so in this particular case. The question 
is not one of abstract right or wrong : it is simply be- 
tween these things and this particular man's attainment 
of eternal life. Of course there is no question about 
things which God forbids. They must be cut off, sum- 
marily, by every disciple. But observe that our Lord 
does not raise that question here. " If thy hand," thine 
own hand, not another man's, " cause thee to stumble," — 
not if it be a cause of stumbling in the abstract, — then 
" cut it off." It is with this view that he selects for 
illustration a thing which is right and good and even 
necessary in itself. It is right to have hands and feet 
and eyes, and to use them, and to keep them unimpaired. 
Many a man may enter life with these unmaimed. 
But, still, it may be that a thing as precious and as need- 
ful as a hand or an eye may act as a stumbling-block. 
In certain cases there is an antagonism between these 
and eternal life. The whole question then centres there. 
Whatever interferes with the attainment of eternal life 
must go. 

Thus, Paul says, " There is nothing unclean of itself," 
but things take their quality of cleanness or uncleanness 
largely from their relation to the individual conscience ; 
and, therefore, " if any man thinketh anything to be un- 
clean," while his thinking does not make it so in itself 
it does make it so for him ; " to him, it is unclean." 
That settles the matter as between himself and God, as 
between himself and God's gift of eternal life. That 
thing he must cut off. 

Eternal life is the great central object of our striving. 



MAIMING AND LIFE. 



215 



Each one of us moves toward that centre from a differ- 
ent point, and each finds different calls to renunciation 
and abridgment on his own line. It is as it was with 
the Israelites at the siege of Jericho. Every man was 
bidden to move straight to the city from the point 
where he should be standing when the trumpets sound- 
ed. One man might find a comparatively clear path on 
his line ; another might find rocks or bushes in his way ; 
a third might have to cross a ravine. But every man 
must keep to his straight line, and regulate his action 
according to the obstacles on that line. Very likely 
many would reach the city lamed or bruised. The dis- 
cipline of life is different for different men. The renun- 
ciations are different. One must cut off what it is right 
for another to keep. The great, the only question is : 
What is there on my line which stands in the way of 
my reaching the end ? Whatever it is, let me cut it off, 
even if the cutting off brings me to the end maimed. 

" We all are in one school : 

Each hath his daily lesson, line on line ; 
But sterner chastisement and stricter rule 
God doth for some design." 

Thus much for self-applied limitations, for conscious 
hindrances in the march to eternal life. On these we 
are to bring to bear the severing power of a renewed 
will : by our own resolve and act to cut them off. But 
there is another class of limitations, the need of which 
we do not perceive. They belong in the higher and 
deeper regions of character, and are linked with facts 



216 MAIMING AND LIFE. 

and tendencies and consequences which our self-knowl- 
edge does not cover. Such limitations we cannot apply- 
to ourselves : they are applied to us by God ; and all 
that our own will has to do with the matter is to concur 
with the limitations, and meekly to accept them when- 
ever and wherever they may be applied. This is the 
harder problem of the two. In this region the discipline 
is the more painful. God cuts off and takes away where 
we can see no reason for it, but, on the contrary, where 
we think we see every reason against it. 

And here we confront a familiar fact. Remember, I 
am speaking of Christians only : the truth does not apply 
to others. There is constantly passing before our eyes 
a multitude of Christian people who are going through 
life maimed on one side or another. There is a man 
with the making of a statesman, a writer, a painter, or a 
poet. How often we say, " What might he not have 
been, if he had only had the opportunities of culture 
and training." But he did not have them. He knows 
his own possibilities. He sees that he might easily 
have been the equal or the superior of the men around 
him ; and he naturally asks, " Why is so much cut off from 
me?" Here is another, susceptible to all the influences 
of the finest culture. He looks upon men with splen- 
did libraries which they cannot use ; with pictures and 
statues which never tell them any story but the number 
of dollars they cost, and naturally he asks, " Why am I 
cut off from these, and condemned to pass my days in 
petty drudgery ? " There is the fact that an immense 
volume of power, culture, holy zeal, practical talent, is 



MAIMING AND LIFE. 2 iy 

hedged in by sickness and helplessness, cut off by blind- 
ness, deafness, or imperfect speech ; and it is not strange 
if from within those imprisoning walls should go up the 
whisper : " We would use our power for God : we are 
eager to serve, eager to speak our word for Him, eager 
to lay our hands to His work. Why does He cut us 
off ? " 

We know, all of us, of men who have something worth 
the hearing to tell the world, but to whom the world 
refuses a hearing. We know of good and wholesome 
books which are gathering dust on library shelves, and 
which men will not read. Scores of people, who deserve 
society's attention and homage more than many who 
command them, do not even receive society's notice. 
" The world knows nothing of its greatest men." These 
are things hard to explain, and still harder to bear ; 
and the only possible solution of the mystery lies in 
the words " eternal life." If our life is ordered simply 
by the laws of matter ; if there is over its economy 
no supreme, brooding love, no absolute wisdom and 
power ; if we are not, in short, in the hands of an infi- 
nite Father who knoweth our frame, and who is ordering 
our life on lines stretching far beyond this mortal en- 
vironment, then I give up the mystery. It is darker 
than midnight. But every true disciple of Christ en- 
ters His school with absolute self-surrender ; with firm 
trust that God will do for him just what will best help 
him on to eternal life ; that He will cut off nothing 
which makes for eternal life ; and, on that basis, every 

one of us, I think, is justified in assuming that these 
10 



2i8 MAIMING AND LIFE. 

deprivations and suppressions which hurt us so keenly 
have a direct and vital bearing, though he may not de- 
tect it, upon that consummation. We are justified in 
concluding that we could not win eternal life with these 
gifts as well as without them — perhaps could not win it 
at all. We are justified, therefore, in saying, " We know 
that all things are working together for good to them 
that love God." 

11 Nor chief, nor only those 

Who break their bonds and cast their cords away, 
Who, unsubmissive, murmur and oppose, 
He scourgeth day by day." 

And so it will be better if we can but enter into life. 
Better, far better, to go maimed all the way than to lose 
eternal life. It matters little that those stately masts 
had to be cut down in the raging gale. No one thinks 
what splendid timbers were thrown overboard, on that 
day when the ship, battered and mastless, and with torn 
sails and tangled cordage, forges into the land-locked 
port with every soul on board safe. Better maimed than 
lost. 



XV. 

DETACHING. 

" Now He that hath wrought us for this very thing 
is God, who gave unto us the earnest of the 
Spirit." — 2 Cor. v. 5. 

Hath wrought us for what ? Of what has God given 
us the earnest ? These questions we naturally ask as we 
read this passage by itself. We must get hold of the 
apostle's line of thought before we can answer them. 
To this end we must read the latter part of the preced- 
ing chapter. Paul is speaking there of earthly afflic- 
tion, and says that it is light as compared with the 
glory of the world to come, and that it is, further, 
an element of the process by which God prepares His 
children for that glory. The afflictions work out an ex- 
ceeding weight of glory. We who suffer, He says, are 
looking, not at what is seen, but at what is unseen. What 
is seen is transient, temporal : what is unseen is eternal ; 
for we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle 
be dissolved, we have an eternal building of God in 
heaven. 

The figures at the beginning of this fifth chapter 

carry out this contrast between the temporal and the 

eternal. The visible, temporal things are represented 

by a tent or tabernacle — a frail, temporary structure, 

(219) 



220 DETACHING. 

easily overthrown, its cords quickly cut, its covering 
easily rent : while the eternal home prepared by God, is 
represented by a building with solid foundations, not 
made with hands like the tents which Paul himself manu- 
factured. 

The thought of the affliction and trouble peculiar to 
this mortal and temporary state is further carried on in 
the next three verses, in which the figure of a building 
runs into and blends with the figure of clothing. In 
this tent of ours we are distressed : we groan : we long to 
be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven : to 
have the heavenly conditions descend upon us and en- 
velop us like an upper garment ; and to have (and here 
still another figure is introduced) this that is mortal 
swallowed up of life. 

This change from the mortal to the immortal is no ac- 
cident. It is the result of a divine intent. Here we 
strike our text. God wrought us for this very thing, 
and has given us the earnest, the foretaste and pledge 
of this change, through His Spirit. 

Our text, therefore, is the expression of the truth that, 
in God's economy, this life is a process of disentangling 
and detachment from its own conditions. Mortal life, 
so far as related to itself, is a getting loose. 

In the first place, let me recall your attention to the 
imagery of the context. We mortals are as dwellers in 
a tent. This tent is being gradually " loosened down ": 
such is the literal meaning of the word "dissolved." 
The same word was used by our Lord of the stones of 
the temple at Jerusalem, and indicates a gradual destruc- 



DETACHING. 



221 



tion, stone after stone. So it would be in striking a tent. 
The tent-pins would be taken out, the cords slackened, 
the covering rolled up, the poles lifted from their sock- 
ets : piece by piece the tent would vanish. Paul has a 
similar figure in his Epistle to the Philippians, where he 
expresses the desire to " depart," or, literally, " to break 
camp." 

This gradual loosening, this detachment, is a familiar 
fact of our life. It would be more familiar if we did not 
persistently shut our eyes to it ; for it is not an agree- 
able fact. Yet there the fact is. We are breaking up ; 
and Scripture emphasizes the fact by asserting that God's 
intent is to break us up. He that hath wrought us for 
this very thing — for the breaking up of the tent as well 
as for the dwelling in the building — is God. " Thou 
turnest man to destruction : Thou earnest them away as 
with a flood." One of the most puzzling things about 
the world is that it is made to be destroyed : that such 
superhuman ingenuity, such perfect finish of workman- 
ship are expended upon things which soon crumble to 
dust. How exquisite is the structure of a bee or of a 
butterfly, and yet how short-lived they are. The Psalm- 
ist praises God because he is fearfully and wonderfully 
made, yet the world is one great cemetery. 

These, I say, are familiar facts. Let us see what is 
our attitude toward them. 

Plainly enough the average man ignores them. He 
strikes out the tabernacle from the text, and substitutes 
a building. He lives and plans as if both he and the 
world were eternal. Now, as you study the life of men 



222 DETACHING. 

around you and your own life, you notice that, in the 
earlier stages of life, the thought of detachment and dis- 
entanglement is practically absent from the mind. Those 
earlier stages are occupied with the contrary process. The 
life is amassing instead of throwing off. It is knitting 
bonds instead of severing them. The love and intimacy 
of the family-circle are taking the boy deeper into them- 
selves. Then his social nature is throwing out tendrils 
and attaching itself to school and college friends. Then 
comes the determined pressure into social and business 
and professional life. The bonds multiply, the connec- 
tions become more numerous : more and more the man 
is getting wrapped round and tied up. Domestic life 
encircles him. Children are born to him. Their inter- 
ests, their future are added to his own. Business be- 
comes engrossing : vast interests, branching out in a 
multitude of directions, encompass him and shut him in 
as in a jungle. To use the common phrase, " He has so 
much to live for." So the world winds round him, coil 
after coil. If the house of his earthly habitation is a 
tent, it is a substantial tent, or so it seems. It has 
stood a good many hard blasts. The man himself, too, 
has been all along growing. His bodily frame has been 
hardening and not weakening. His strength, his power' 
of resistance, his knowledge, and his mental grasp have 
been growing. Thought has been taking a larger range 
and sinking its shafts deeper ; and difficulty has acted 
only as a stimulus to energy. In short, I repeat, the 
thought of dissolution and detachment at this period, 
fall into the background. All is growth, increase, en- 



DETACHING. 



223 



largement of range ; multiplying points of contact with 
the world ; a larger variety in the man's own environ- 
ment. 

But, as time goes on, you notice a change. The man 
has reached his altitude. Perhaps he shines there with 
a steady splendor for yet a good many years ; but his 
position or reputation are practically fixed. His stand- 
ing in the community is defined. Men know how far 
they can draw on him and what purposes he can serve, 
and into what places he will fit. He is no longer a man 
of promise. His age, if it do not find fulfilment, drops 
him. The cords on the rear of the tent begin to slacken. 
There have been bonds which still held him strongly to 
the past. A father or a mother dies. Brothers and sis- 
ters form new alliances and new homes for themselves, 
and their interests and his diverge. The old circle of 
kindred begins to break up. It goes on quietly, like the 
undermining of a bank, where now and then a loosened 
mass dropping into the stream shows that the current is 
at work ; but some day he wakes up to the fact that his 
connections are mostly with his own generation, while 
the cords which held him to the love and wisdom and 
fellowship of his fathers — fibres along which something 
of the freshness of boyhood and youth still found its 
way into his maturer life — now hang slack or severed. 
And, as time moves on, a new and more startling fact 
begins to emerge — that the connections with his own 
generation are gradually breaking. More and more pro- 
nounced is the sense of the push of a mass of younger, 
fresher life, crowding him back or on one side. The 



224 



DETACHING. 



world is not for him as he thought it was. It is for 
youth. The children, to whom he has been an author- 
ity, are developing independent ideas of their own, and 
are carrying them out without much regard to his ap- 
proval or disapproval. A familiar face vanishes at inter- 
vals from the counting-room or the council-table. Little 
time to pause for this ; only a day for decorous funeral 
ceremonial. The gap is filled. There is no vacant place 
to look at. Only some day he realizes that almost all 
his old comrades are gone. The very respect of men is 
suspicious. It is the formal respect they pay to the an- 
tiquated. 

The break is heading toward the centres of life. He 
has lost some ambition. He has given up certain things 
he was always meaning to do. He is not so ready for 
the undertakings which make a drain on nerve and 
strength. He gives up more easily than of yore. The 
spring has gone out of him. Younger men may come 
to the front unchallenged. The front is a hot, dangerous 
place, under fire, and rest and quiet are growing sweeter. 

And so the final stage sets in ; physical wreck, mental 
feebleness, complete withdrawal from the busy world. 
Let it go on its way. He cares no longer. The tent 
with its loosened cords flaps and strains, then collapses. 
There are eulogies and obituaries and an epitaph. The 
earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved : and yet He 
that wrought us for this very thing is God. God meant 
this : meant that our earthly house should be a tent and 
not a building : meant that it should be transitory and 
not eternal. 



DETACHING. 



225 



This is a very sad picture, if this is all. Nay, it is an 
insult to common sense to ask us to believe that this 
wondrous frame of nature and of man are made merely to 
be destroyed. Reverently speaking — speaking from the 
stand-point of thought at which God's own Word and 
Spirit place us — we may say that such a result would argue 
a wanton and arbitrary exercise of power. But this is not 
all. God did not make us for death, but for life. If He 
has appointed a tent for our sojourn, He has reared a 
building for our dwelling. Moses, in that old psalm, 
voices the truth. There is nothing eternal but God. 
There is no warrant of man's eternity but God. There 
is no eternal home for man but in God. The old law- 
giver looked forth from the tent where a generation was 
dying out in the wilderness ; looked away from the pur- 
ple mountains, the most impressive symbol of stability 
which the earth furnishes ; looked away into what would 
have been vacancy to many another eye, and saw the 
eternal home there. " Lord, Thou hast been our dwell- 
ing-place in all generations. Before the mountains were 
brought forth or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and 
the world, from everlasting to everlasting Thou art 
God." 

And so we turn to the other side of our text. God 
has made us for the tent, but He has also made us for 
the building. 

The important point is that we should see these two 
things as parts of one economy — the tent and the build- 
ing as related to each other. How death and decay 
came into the world is not now the question. We are 



IO' 



226 DETACHING. 

dealing merely with the facts. Now, I may say here 
that even if sin had never entered the world, I doubt 
whether this human life and this human body would 
have been any more than a temporary stage of existence 
through which men would have passed into a purely 
spiritual life. Because I find that this is according to 
the analogy of God's working elsewhere, if not every- 
where. God's plans unfold. They do not flash into 
consummation. They involve progressive stages ; and 
immense expenditure of time and of labor is concen- 
trated upon single stages, which, after all, seem to be 
little more than stand-points for succeeding stages. 
God's economy distinctly takes in the transitory and 
the temporal as well as the eternal. The line of His 
purpose runs out to eternity, but it runs through time. 
And so I repeat, that, without questioning the state- 
ment that death came by sin, I think I can understand 
how, even if sin had not entered, human life might have 
been temporary, a transition stage to something higher ; 
and how, therefore, the apostle might truthfully say, 
even of God's original intent — even of the tent no less 
than of the building — " He that hath wrought us for 
this very thing is God." 

Thought has tended too much to the violent separa- 
tion of the mortal life from the eternal life : has tended 
to set them in contrast and opposition instead of in har- 
mony : has tended to regard them as representing dif- 
ferent economies, instead of as being included in one 
and the same economy. For instance, we draw the line 
sharply between life and death ; and yet many a scien- 



DETACHING. 



227 



tist will tell you that death is the beginning of life : and 
Christ and Paul tell you that in unmistakable terms. And 
what we want clearly to apprehend with reference to 
this mortal, transitory tent-life of ours, is that it has a 
definite relation to the permanent spiritual life of the 
future ; that it serves a purpose of preparation and de- 
velopment toward that life : that it furnishes a basis, a 
soil in which the seeds of the spiritual life are sown ; and 
that, therefore, instead of being despised and neglected 
because it is temporary and destined to dissolution, it is 
to be cherished and cultivated as the real and effective 
ministrant of the eternal life. " He that wrought us for 
this very thing is God." If God made us merely to die, 
and if death is the end, why, then, life has very little sig- 
nificance. If He made us to live forever, and if our life 
here fits into that life beyond, and prepares us for it, 
then life is not only significant, but gets its chief signifi- 
cance from that other thing for which God hath wrought 
us — the building of God eternal in the heavens. We have 
in nature a great many illustrations and analogies of the 
fact that what is transitory and ephemeral directly minis- 
ters to higher and more enduring forms of life. Take, 
for instance, the illustration of the soil. Existence un- 
derground, in the dark, is a low form of life, and yet the 
seed must be cast into the ground and remain there for 
a time, before the beauty and fruitfulness and nourish- 
ment of the fruit or grain can become facts. And that 
preliminary stage in the dark mould is not merely a pe- 
riod of idle, passive waiting. That stage ministers di- 
rectly to the higher form of life. So in animal life. 



228 DETACHING. 

What a delicate and beautiful structure is the egg of the 
fowl. How perfect its outlines. How fine the texture and 
tinting of the shell. Yet how frail. It is made, as we 
all see, to be broken, and an egg-shell is a synonym for 
something worthless. And yet there have been lodged 
in that frail and temporary thing forces which minister 
to life. That little casket holds and protects and fosters 
the life of the infant bird, and in it are begun and nour- 
ished those processes of life which are taken up and car- 
ried on by a new set of ministries from the moment that 
the fowl emerges from the shell. So the worm rolls 
himself up in the cocoon, but within the cocoon the pur- 
ple and golden glories of the butterfly are silently elab- 
orating themselves. 

Even so it is God's intent that the immortal, the spir- 
itual life should be taking shape under the forms of the 
mortal life : that in the tent man should be shaping for 
the eternal building : that in this frail, fleshly environ- 
ment we should be growing familiar with the powers of 
the world to come ; should be coming more and more 
under their influence ; should be growing more and more 
into sympathy with the principles and the ideas of the 
eternal world ; growing in aspiration for their larger 
range, and even welcoming the dissolution of the tent 
as the signal and medium of entrance into the eternal 
building. 

This feature of our mortal life is intended to show it- 
self early. The average human life, as we have seen, 
tends to become more and more enveloped in the wrap- 
pings of this world, and to consider nothing else ; and 



DETACHING. 



229 



many practically reason that attention to the interests 
of the next world may be deferred until the process of 
detachment from the things of time has fairly and con- 
sciously set in. In other words, that a man need give heed 
to the things of eternity only when his breaking up warns 
him that he is about to pass into eternity. On the con- 
trary, the life should be shaped for eternity from the be- 
ginning. The ministry of the soil begins with the 
very first stage of the seed-life. The world to come 
does not appeal merely to manhood and old age. 
It is the child that is most inquisitive about the sky ; 
who cries for the moon ; to whom the stars are a won- 
der. Why not the same fact in spiritual life ? Why 
should not heavenly aspirations characterize childhood ? 
Why should not the child-life be touched and quickened 
by contact with heaven ? At any rate, from the time that 
the idea is fairly grasped that this life is a stage to a 
larger and permanent life — not merely a stage of wait- 
ing, but a stage of shaping for that life — from that time 
the larger life of eternity inaugurates its own process in 
child or man, and gives their life its own direction. 
Under the wrappings which earthly business and earthly 
relationship swathe round him ; under the tangled lines 
which connect him with so many and such varied inter- 
ests ; under the shape into which the contact of the 
world presses the visible outlines of his life, a life may 
be taking shape whose quality and tendencies are heav- 
enly. Within and under the life of society, the life of 
business, the domestic life, an eternal, spiritual manhood 
may be outlining itself. 



230 DETACHING. 

When men have undertaken to shut themselves out 
as much as possible from the contact of this life, when 
they have walled themselves up in cloisters, or have 
sought for saintship in dismal caverns or on the top of 
pillars, they have mistaken the intent of this life. They 
have not seen that He that hath wrought us for this 
very thing is God. They have seen in mortal life only 
a contradiction, an antagonism to eternal life, and not a 
minister to it. It has been as though the embryo bird 
should refuse the nourishment for his initial life which 
the egg supplies, and should refuse to call it living until 
he had escaped from the shell into the air and sunshine. 

Detachment, breaking up, come of themselves, come 
quickly enough in God's own order. Meanwhile, it is 
not for us to accelerate the process, but to keep our- 
selves on the line of God's great purpose to make the 
tent tributary to the building ; to make the mortal life 
minister to the immortal. That this thing is made to 
break up, does not prove that it has no permanent pur- 
pose to serve. That you and I are short-lived and frail, 
that we are dust, as God tells us we are, does not prove 
that we cannot turn our brevity and frailty to account 
in the interest of our eternal life. Building is the type 
of the permanent, but all building involves the tem- 
porary. 

Many of you remember how, for years, as the traveller 
on the Rhine came in sight of Cologne, the first object 
which greeted his eye was the unsightly mass of scaffold- 
ing around the Cathedral spires. It is all gone now, 
and the twin spires soar heavenward from their base, 



DETACHING. 






and cut the horizon with their clean, sharp lines of stone. 
Yet the scaffolds were necessary to the building. No 
Holding, no spires. Whether this life is to be more 
than scaffolding depends on the man who lives ; depends 
on whether or not he mistakes scaffolding for building. 
Connections he must make. He must have earthly no 
less than heavenly environment. Windings innumerable, 
social, domestic, commercial, go into the texture of his 
earthly tent. The question is whether these are all : 
whether these things are ends unto themselves : whether 
the cocoon in which the mortal life enswathes itself is 
to be regarded as its final investiture, or as a sphere for 
the development of the life of heaven : whether mortal- 
ity is simply to be dissolved, or whether mortality is to 
be swallowed up of life. It is for this, for .allow- 

ing up of life, that God hath wrought us ; and the real 
character will be set upon your life and mine by our 
recognizing or failing to recognize that fact. 

If the cocoon is all that the worm comes to, poor 
worm ! Worthless cocoon ! If business, politics, social 
life, fame, are all the man comes to, poor ma:: ! I: is 
a sad, sad thing if all is summed up in the dissolving of 
the house of this tabernacle. For it will c: It is 

olving. You see and know it yourselves. Aire 
with many of you the cords are slackening, the wrap- 
pings loosening, the shell breaking. 

What then? The tent will fall. Shall you be left 
uncovered ? Beware, beware of these same wrappings. 
They are folding you in closely. You are growing in 
reputation and in wealth, and the world is a very pleas- 



232 



DETACHING. 



ant place to you. Your tent-strings are taut ; your pins 
well driven, your tent-cloth of fine and rich texture ; 
your tent is looming up and making a good appearance 
among the other tents : all well perhaps, if these things 
are not all : if, under your busy life, there is the constant 
presence of God, a carefully-fostered, keen conscious- 
ness of the touch of God ; an unbroken connection be- 
tween heaven and your tent ; a daily interchange between 
Christ and you : if, in short, to put it as Paul does, your 
citizenship is in heaven, and the mark of heaven is on 
your words and your life and your spirit. Your tent 
does not shut you out from heaven's light ; need not if 
you will see to it that the curtains are drawn back to 
let in the light. 

God hath wrought you for this. Again I say, God 
hath made the tent that it might serve the building. 
He has made you a man in time that you may be a glo- 
rified spirit in eternity. 

Hence detachment may mean for you victory and im- 
mortality. God hath wrought you for the eternal building 
in the heavens, no less than for the frail, perishing tent on 
earth. You will have gained much when you shall have 
learned to read in dissolution the prophecy of eternal 
stability ; the foreshadowing of life in the approaches of 
death. That you may learn this, God hath given to you 
the earnest of His Spirit. To the eyes which that Spirit 
unseals, every break, every collapse, every sign of wear, 
is a touch, throwing into sharper outline God's own 
handwriting, " We have a building of God, a house not 
made with hands, eternal in the heavens." He that 



DETACHING. 



233 



hath wrought you for this is God. Something within 
tells you you are more than mortal. Something assures 
you that you are not made for these wrappings which 
fade and rend. Something tells you that the tatters of 
mortality are not the final outcome of God's intent 
concerning man. The materialist will warn you that 
your wish is father to your thought : that a natural 
desire is not to be construed into a fact : that longing 
must yield to logic, and instincts be content to wither at 
the touch of science. None the less, instincts have 
wrought with wonderful power in the history of human- 
ity. The religious feeling, however unscientific, has made 
a formidable stand against a godless materialism which 
reduces life to matter and force. But, more than this, 
the Gospel interprets and defines this instinct as a reve- 
lation of God, wrought into the very fibre of our human- 
ity, the earnest of the Spirit. You who believe in Jesus 
and the resurrection may safely trust that testimony ; 
you may rest in that prophecy with joy. You cannot 
arrest the decay, but you may turn it to account ; you 
may translate it into hope : you may see in it emancipa- 
tion, fulness of life, an inheritance incorruptible, unde- 
fined, and unfading. 



XVI. 

THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 

" 7" John, your brother and partaker with you in the 
tribulation and kingdom and patience which are 
Z7i Jesus, was in the isle that is called Patmos, 
for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. " 
— Rev. i. 9. 

THAT is a very remarkable phrase — " the kingdom 
and patience." It might almost seem to be an arbitrary 
and fanciful phrase. And more than this, the two ideas 
would appear, to some minds at least, to be contradic- 
tory. Patience does not appeal to such minds as a 
kingly virtue, but rather as a commonplace quality be- 
fitting people of humbler rank. As for a king, why 
should he wait when he has the power to accomplish at 
once ? Why should he tolerate the slowness of others 
when he can command sure and swift agents ? Impa- 
tience is somehow conceived as a king's privilege. 

The Bible puts this whole matter directly the other 
way. Kinghood, instead of being dissevered from pa- 
tience, is bound up with it : the kingly virtues are all 
intertwined with patience and dependent upon it. The 
kingdom, the divine kingdom, is inherited through faith 
and patience, and the kingly man is the patient man. 

This truth, when we come to examine it, is not con- 
fined to the region of Scripture or of religion. It is, in 
(234) 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 



235 



part at least, an every-day, business truth. It is a fa- 
miliar enough fact that the great successes of the world 
have been won by hard and patient work, and not by 
inspired flashes ; and we are beginning to have greater 
respect for the power of holding on than for the power 
of brilliant striking out. 

And, as in so many cases, Christ shows us how, in 
these familiar views, we have gotten hold of one end 
of a truth which runs up through the whole spiritual 
economy ; a truth which takes the form of a principle : 
patience is kinghood. 

But if that principle is to commend itself practically 
to mankind, it must be incarnated. Men will not be- 
lieve it on the strength of mere assertion. There is a 
disposition, and it is a healthful one, to challenge all moral 
requisitions which rest on mere precept. Men say, " It 
is easy enough for an idealist to retire from the world, 
and write down rules and frame moral theories. Wait 
till the idealist gets down to where we are : wait till his 
rules and theories are set at work in this region of half- 
sight, of clashing wills, of natural wants, where we toil 
and suffer and fight : wait till these fine moral ideals are 
applied to the unexpected crooks and turns in human 
nature, and are set against the onset and shock of hard 
facts. Then see what they are worth. Then see what 
they can do." So, when this claim of royalty is made for 
patience, the world says, " It is nothing to us that even 
God says it is kingly. Let us see it on the throne. 
Let us see this plodding, quiet virtue, this thing so far 
removed from high spirit, conquer its place and grasp 



236 THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 

the sceptre. Show us a kingly man who is also a model 
of patience, and who wins his crown of manhood through 
patience." 

In response to that demand Christ puts forward Him- 
self and the lives which He inspires ; such a life, for in- 
stance, as that of John, who, though the victim of an 
impatient, fitful, brutal sovereignty, though a sufferer 
and an exile, can yet salute his brethren as kings, and 
style himself " your brother in the kingdom and patience 
which are in Jesus." 

We take the statement, therefore, just as it stands. 
In Jesus there are these two elements, dominion and 
patience. Let us try and have clearly before us the con- 
trast between Christ and the mass of men whom He 
came to save ; and this will afford us at least a practical 
gauge of the severity of the strain upon His patience. 

Though our Saviour adapted Himself to human con- 
ditions, it goes without saying that He was, regarded 
merely as a man, superior to other men. That is 
conceded on all hands. His word was instinctively 
recognized as carrying a mysterious authority. " Never 
man spake like this man." He impressed the judge who 
condemned Him and the officer who executed Him. 
He had a strange and subtle attraction for men, from 
the day when He questioned the doctors in the temple, 
until the hour when the centurion said, " Surely this 
was a righteous man." Moreover, Christ was consciously 
superior. " Ye call me," said He, " the teacher and the 
Lord, and ye say well, for so I am." And when Peter 
declared in answer to His question, "Thou art the 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 



237 



Christ, the Son of the living God," so far from disclaim- 
ing the honor, He pronounced a special blessing on 
Peter for his confession. 

But Christ's superiority was put at the service of men, 
to raise and to save them. It was not goodness and 
greatness coming before ignorance and simplicity to dis- 
play themselves and to call forth stupid wonder. Christ's 
greatness came down to the level of the lost, that He 
might seek and save that which was lost. 

Now, I ask you to consider the peculiar trial of pa- 
tience applied to a cultured mind and a pure character 
in contact with dense ignorance, wicked cruelty, intense 
bigotry, enormous conceit, and personal degradation in 
every conceivable form. 

Look at the matter, for instance, on its lowest side. 
Did you ever do a full day's work in a hospital, sur- 
rounded from morning until evening with the sick and 
wounded and dying, scarcely for a moment out of the 
sound of moans or of sights which wrung your heart ? 
If you have, you know how weary in body you were 
when the night came. And yet your worst experience 
of that kind was probably but a faint shadow of many 
days in Christ's life, especially those in which He was 
pressed all day long by that fearful oriental crowd, 
thrusting their various ailments upon His attention, 
bringing their diseased friends to His feet, while, through 
the hot, dust-laden air, penetrated the moan of pain or 
the shriek of the demoniac. Christ's work must have 
entailed a severe physical strain. The tension of His 
finely-strung, sensitive, emotional nature must have told 



238 THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 

powerfully upon the strongest body : yet we never read 
of His growing irritated, or of His seeking to evade the 
contact with sickness. He gives Himself freely to the 
wretched. He ministers up to the limit of His strength, 
and then withdraws to the mountains and to His lonely, 
peaceful communion with heaven, to recruit His powers 
for new draughts upon His patient love. 

It is not so very hard to keep patience with an igno- 
rant person who feels his ignorance, and wants to learn. 
The trial comes when ignorance mistakes itself for 
wisdom : when it is bent, not on learning, but on assert- 
ing itself. This was what Christ had to meet daily. 
He came to teach men who thought they had nothing 
to learn about the principles and the practice of religion. 
In the face of taunts and abuse, surrounded by learned 
men who could not appreciate His broader vision and 
His higher ideals of religion, how patiently and persist- 
ently He repeats His lessons by word and act. To eat 
with publicans and sinners was to fly in the face of 
tradition and custom ; yet so often was the act repeated 
that it became one of the standing charges against Him : 
and yet it was never done defiantly, but always in pursu- 
ance of some purpose of love. In like manner He was 
not withheld from doing acts of mercy on the Sabbath day 
by the charge of being a Sabbath-breaker. One would 
suppose that the narrowest spirit would have rejoiced 
over such a gracious deed as the healing of the with- 
ered hand ; but the Pharisees went out and took counsel 
how they might destroy Him. Yet how gently He rea- 
sons with them. " If you have one sheep, and it falls 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 



239 



into a pit on the Sabbath day, do you not lift it out ? 
Is not a man of more value than a sheep ? Wherefore, 
it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath day." That de- 
graded Samaritan woman, entrenched in her ignorant 
prejudices, and urging her stale traditions against 
Jesus' purer teachings — whose patience would not 
have been tried by her? And yet our Lord will 
have no quarrel with her. All sense of personal annoy- 
ance is swallowed up in His eagerness to save her ; and 
that story, as it seems to me, ought to be read over 
and over again, and studied in every detail, and com- 
mitted to memory by every one who seeks to draw 
human souls to the truth. 

Wise and good men who devote their lives to the 
ignorant, have nevertheless some compensations. They 
step out of their own congenial circle, where their char- 
acter and thoughts are appreciated, and down into the 
lower circle ; but they can step back again at intervals^ 
and refresh themselves with the contact and sympathy 
of congenial minds. But this compensation was denied 
Christ. There was, indeed, a small band that loved Him, 
listened to Him, and believed in Him, but even these 
could sympathize with Him only to a very small extent. 
Nothing is more evident than that they failed to appre- 
ciate His main aims and principles, and that their growth 
was very slow in those elements of character which He 
most desired to develop. How slow they were, for in- 
stance, in learning the secret of true greatness. With 
the spectacle daily before their eyes of a master whom 
they reverenced and whose infinite superiority they 



240 THE KINGH00D OF PATIENCE. 

felt, putting Himself at the service of the lowest, they 
yet quarreled among themselves as to who should be 
greatest in their little company. Peter, who could utter 
that glorious confession, " Thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God," could tempt that Christ to swerve 
from His act of self-sacrifice and to believe that He was 
too good to suffer. How many times He had occasion 
to rebuke their slowness of faith : when the storm came 
down on the lake, and they rushed to Him, crying, 
" Lord, save us, we perish ": when they stood helpless 
before the possessed child at the foot of Hermon : when 
the two opened to Him their doubts and fears on the 
way to Emmaus : when Thomas met the tidings of His 
resurrection with such obstinate, senseless incredulity. 
How many times He had to say, " O ye of little faith ! 
O foolish and slow of heart to believe ! " This is one of 
the hardest of all things for a true man of high and pure 
aims — to go through the world without sympathy : and 
not a few men have shown themselves unable to en- 
dure it. Sometimes they have lowered their ideal : 
sometimes they have compromised : sometimes they 
have grown bitter and defiant and misanthropic. Noth- 
ing is more beautiful than the patience of Christ as 
related to His uncompromising fidelity to His standard 
of duty and of truth : His holding by His principles 
while He holds on at the same time to those slow, 
backward pupils in the school of faith and of self-sacri- 
fice. 

Many a man, by his severe devotion to his moral 
ideals, cuts himself loose from other men. They admire 



THE KIXGHCOD OF PATIENCE. 



241 



his courage and consistency, but refuse to follow him ; 
and a reason for this is often found in his impatience 
with their slowness. He scolds them because they are 
not as radical as he is. He sneers at their principles be- 
cause they will not carry them out to the same length 
that he does. He will not let them go part of the way 
with him because they will not go all the way ; and thus 
he not only loses them altogether, but converts them 
into enemies. It was the patience of Christ which en- 
abled Him to bate not one jot of His high claims and at 
the same time to lose none of those whom the Father 
had given Him. He could mourn over slow faith and 
uneducated conscience and low ideals of duty, yet He 
could go on teaching, and continue to wait long and pa- 
tiently while they toiled slowly and painfully up toward 
His higher level. Cannot modern radicalism learn some 
lessons from this? " Radical," properly understood, is an 
honorable title. A genuine truth-seeker is always radi- 
cal, and Christ was the most radical teacher and reformer 
the world ever saw ; but Christ's success, won by patience, 
is an expressive comment on a great many failures of 
radical teachers who want to bring in the millennium at 
once ; and whose motto is, millennium or nothing. 

Look, for instance, at Christ's patience in dealing with 
those who, though convinced of the rightfulness of His 
claims and secretly on His side, yet hesitated to confess 
Him openly. He used no doubtful words about the 
duty of open confession and the consequences of with- 
holding it. He would deny before the Father the man 

who should finally refuse to confess Him before men : 
n 



242 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 



and yet He could wait for that confession: He could 
give feeble courage time for training. He could pa- 
tiently and persistently and gently apply influences to 
those souls to quicken their conscience and to shame 
them of their cowardice. A reformer who represents a 
new and unpopular cause, stern, brave, outspoken him- 
self, naturally desires the same qualities in his followers. 
He wants them to come out boldly on his side, and he 
is tempted to be very impatient with any partial com- 
mittal. Yet Christ had to deal with such. Let us re- 
member that the Holy Ghost with its baptism of power 
and courage was not yet given. Christ himself could 
take the highest way, knowing that it ended at the cross, 
and could pursue it to Calvary ; but He knew very well 
that not all the men under His teaching could do that 
yet. He had a Thomas, who, doubter as he was, pro- 
posed to go to Bethany and die with Him ; and a John, 
who followed Him to His judgment ; but He had a Nico- 
demus, who was afraid to commune with Him in the day- 
time, and a Peter who could openly deny Him, and a 
Joseph of Arimathea who was afraid to declare his belief 
in Him while He lived. Jesus could wait — wait even 
till after His death — for these timid ones. His patience 
was vindicated. Nicodemus spoke for Him, timidly it 
is true, in the Sanhedrim, and brought spices for His 
burial. Joseph refused to vote against Him in the 
council, and boldly begged His body of Pilate and 
buried it in his own tomb ; and Peter's is among the 
loudest and clearest of the voices which ring through 
the history of the infant church. Jesus himself had 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 243 

seen over that sad, humiliating period of cowardice and 
treachery, to a time when Peter should be the rock of 
the early church. So he was, and he went to the death 
of the cross for Christ's sake. 

And there was another case : that of the one who 
used His name and His power, and yet did not identify 
himself formally with Him : the man who was casting 
out devils in His name, and whom the disciples forbade 
because he did not follow with them. Ah ! how often 
we have heard that same prohibition in later days ! that 
utterance of religious partisanship which refuses to rec- 
ognize the rightfulness or the virtue of a good, Christ- 
like deed, and the nobility of a Christlike character out- 
side of religious party-limits. When shall we learn that 
whatever anywhere is Christlike v is Christian ? How 
much it would have been to Christ to have all such 
men openly arrayed with Him ; yet what a noble toler- 
ance breathes in His reply to the disciples : what a keen 
recognition of Christlike quality : " Forbid him not. 
After all the man shows himself on my side. He is 
not the friend of the demon that he casts out. He is 
indeed not my friend in the full sense that I could wish, 
but he is not my enemy. He that is not against us is 
on our part. No man can do a miracle in my name and 
lightly speak evil of me." 

Once more let me briefly refer you to Christ's patience 
as shown in His method of securing friends and helpers. 
Most reformers, in their zeal to secure partisans, are 
willing to receive them under the influence of moment- 
ary enthusiasm. They are willing to have a man com- 



244 THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 

mit himself while his reason is unconvinced and only 
his fancy captivated. You cannot but observe how 
Christ guarded against this mistake, though His caution 
doubtless cost Him many followers. He had patience 
to wait for followers who should embrace His cause 
deliberately, from conviction ; and in this light the 
plainness of His statements concerning the terms and 
consequences of His service are worth noting. Nothing 
is concealed. Tribulation, self-denial, possible sundering 
of earthly ties — all are plainly set forth as the conse- 
quences of following Him : and then there is a commen- 
tary upon this in His words of warning addressed to 
enthusiastic votaries. " You wish to follow me. Count 
the cost as men do in their ordinary affairs. A king 
does not go forth to battle without knowing his adver- 
sary's force, and calculating whether he can resist or 
overthrow it. A man does not build a house without 
ascertaining how much it is going to cost him." The 
scribe comes to Him and says, " I will follow Thee 
wherever Thou goest." " Well, good scribe, come after 
me if you will : take me as master if you will : only re- 
member that your master fares in worldly things not so 
well as the foxes and the birds." The two young aspir- 
ants, led by their fond mother, come and ask for high 
places in His kingdom. I wonder if they penetrated the 
awful meaning of the question with which Jesus met 
them : " Can ye drink of my cup and be baptized with 
my baptism ? " 

And now I should like to dwell upon the patience of 
Christ as shown in His waiting : but the time forbids. 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 



245 



Just a hint or two on this point. Christ's mission, in 
its very nature, involved long, patient waiting. It was 
the mission of a sower, sowing seed of slow growth. 
The harvest of Christ's ideas was not going to be reaped 
in three years nor in a hundred. He knew perfectly 
that He should return from earth leaving behind Him 
almost nothing in the way of visible results. And you 
will remember how He was tempted at this point at the 
very beginning of His ministry. Do you suppose that 
Satan, when he spread before the Son of man that gor- 
geous vision of the kingdoms of this world, expected to 
appeal to any shallow fondness for power and display 
and luxury ? No. He knew Christ too well to offer 
Him any such cheap toy. The failure of His first temp- 
tation showed how much the Lord cared for mere sen- 
sual gratification. He could play upon a more sensitive 
chord than that. He could offer to the Saviour the 
temptation of going at one stride to His goal by assert- 
ing His kingly authority, by setting up an earthly do- 
minion, by bringing in a condition of worldly happiness 
through righteous and merciful government instead of 
through the slower process of spiritual regeneration. 
He could open to Jesus a gate to a road which led 
round the cross. And to a nature like Christ's, so loving 
and so tender, to One whose dearest employment was 
to help and to comfort the wretched, there must have 
been something alluring in the thought of tiding over 
those long ages of blood and Jears and misery which 
lay between Bethlehem and the new Jerusalem ; the 
thought of going at once to the throne of the world, 



246 THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 

and by His power exerted against injustice and in the 
interest of good order and of the common weal, redress- 
ing so many wrongs, " stanching all those fountains of 
tears, and imparting all that knowledge of His Father's 
love." And yet Christ knew that the results of such a 
course would be superficial. He knew that the only 
sure basis for a happy society on earth was holiness. 
He knew that the road to the new city of God where 
entereth nothing which defileth, lay, not only for Him, 
but for the world, by the way of the cross. And so He 
deliberately turned from the vision of worldly power. 
His answer to those who charged Him with aspiring to 
kinghood was invariably, " My kingdom is not of this 
world." He was content to await the slow growth of 
the Gospel seed, the slow pervasion of the Gospel leaven ; 
to wait for the consummation of a sovereignty based on 
the spiritual transformation wrought by the Gospel. 
His course in this stands out as the sublimest illustra- 
tion of patience in all time, and stamps Him as the true 
King of the ages. 

Thus, then, we see this element of patience wrought 
into the very fibre of Christ's kinghood. With all His 
other qualities He could be the king He is, and shall be 
confessed, only through His patience. Even from these 
few illustrations, which might be multiplied indefinitely, 
we begin to understand John's phrase, " the kingdom 
and patience of Jesus Christ." 

And Christ, therefore, by His own example, no less 
than by His word, commends to us this kingly virtue 
of patience. The apostle James has caught the mean- 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 



247 



ing of His life and its relation to our lives when he 
says, " Let patience have its perfect work, that ye may 
be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing." Surely he 
does not mean that a man who is merely patient is 
perfect : but he does mean that a man who is not 
patient cannot be perfect. He does mean that this 
quality of patience is indispensable to the growth 
and maturing of every other Christian quality. Love ! 
Can there be any true love without patience ? Does 
not love bear all things ? Is it love when we merely 
love those who never try us, who always please us, 
who are always congenial ? " If ye love them which 
love you, what thank have ye ? Do not even the 
publicans the same?" Look at the love of God in 
Christ Jesus. God so loved the world that He gave 
His only-begotten Son. Was the world lovely or lov- 
able ? Was the society into which Jesus boldly threw 
Himself, and upon which He poured out His heart and 
His gracious ministries, a thing calculated to inspire 
love, in our sense of the term ? Even from what we 
have seen in this brief review, is it conceivable that 
Christ's love should have had any power or any result 
without patience ? Nay, let us come nearer home. Let 
us look at ourselves as we stand related to God in Christ 
to-day. Take the element of patience out of God's love, 
and what becomes of us ? Are we indeed so lovable, so 
free from fault, does our fidelity and our conformity to 
the Divine standard of character so commend itself to 
our heavenly Father that He has simly to approve it ? 
Or is it not rather the case that we stumble and blunder 



248 THE KINGH003 OF PATIENCE. 

all the way to heaven ; thai we appeal by our wavering 

and our carelessness and our vanity, moic to the for« 

bearance than to the approbation of God? And so of 
all the other virtues. What Is faith if il be not persist- 
ent ? Do wc think of faith merely as a single ad of be- 
lief? Is it not rather a hard, persistent holding on 

against the efforts Of earth and lull to shake US > 

Arc: we not bidden to be follower', of those who through 

faith and patience inherit t he promises ? Take thai 
ries of graces arrayed in the first chapter of second IVter 

— faith, virtue;, knowledge, temperance, godliness, love 
of the brethren, love: and strike out patience, and does 

not the- whole: chain fall tO pieces? Can any of these 
thrive and erow without patience? 

So, then, if you and I are expecting to win moral 
and spiritual dominion, this element must come to the 
front in our lives. Suppose wc: want to ood, truth- 

ful, pure in heart, single in purpose, Christlike In temper. 
Are these things wrought in us on the Instant ? What 
is the story our own experience tells us? Some of us 

have: been trying for a good many years. Have we- got- 
ten past the necessity of going to God's throne with 

confession and penitence? Are- there no fresh scars 
upon us from recent Stumbles? Have "passion's unruly 
nurslings" been " rocked to sleep"? Is the fire all ^onc- 
OUt of our tongues? And has there: been born to us a 
sense of rest as of those who feel that the strain is over 
and the hardness of the fighl past ? Nc>, brethren, you 

and I know it is not so. We: know thai each morning 

we wake to a twofold fight, with the world outside and 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 249 

with the self within. God help us, if patience fail. God 
help us, if there be not something within which keeps 
firm hold of the exceeding great and precious promises ; 
which will not suffer faith to fail, that He that hath be- 
gun a good work will perfect it ; which is not disheart- 
ened at slow progress, and which, spite of the tears and 
the dust, keeps our faces turned toward the place where 
we know the crown and the glory are, though we cannot 
see them. 

So, too, like Christ, we have a work to do among 
men. We shall not do it without patience. We are 
constantly tempted to a false and selfish view of our 
relation to society : to think that society exists for our 
pleasure and comfort only, and to lose out of sight the 
other truth, that, as Christians, we exist for the good of 
society. And therefore our tendency is to eliminate 
from society all that is uncongenial, everything which 
can possibly be a tax on patience, and to put it on one 
side as a thing with which we have nothing to do. But 
that is not Christ's way. If we are to be true followers 
of His we must frankly accept the contact with the un- 
congenial and the unlovable as part of our lives, and 
the trial of patience which comes with it. If we want 
the kingdom of Jesus Christ, we cannot have it without 
the patience of Jesus Christ. We must try and get a 
firmer hold of the great principle of Christ's life : " not 
to be ministered unto, but to minister"; and when we 
shall have gotten it clearly into our minds that our 
main purpose in life is not to be blessed by the world, 

but to bless the world, then we shall find ourselves on 
11* 



250 THE KINGH00D OF PA TIENCE. 

the road where every day and every hour will beget a 
prayer for the patience of Jesus Christ. Bearing, wait- 
ing, enduring, — these do not seem to be means to king- 
hood ; but if we aim at spiritual kinghood, dominion 
over our hearts, dominion over self, dominion over char- 
acter — the kingdom of Jesus Christ — that and that only 
is the way to it. 

And we must try to put ourselves, moreover, at Christ's 
stand-point, in our outlook upon religious progress. I 
think the patience of Jesus grows upon us as we, here 
nearly at the end of nineteen centuries, see what His 
prophetic vision saw — how much yet remains to be done 
ere Christ's spiritual dominion shall have become a world- 
wide fact. The prayer, "Thy kingdom come," is taking 
on a new meaning and a new intensity to some in these 
later days ; and, what is more, is being put up ofttimes 
under a gigantic shadow of doubt. The kingdom seems 
so slow in coming. The blows are redoubled at the old 
foundations. The cold materialism of the age is so 
pronounced. We want faith at this point, but we 
want patience and much of it. We need not doubt 
Christ's word. His kingdom will come, is coming, 
coming straight and steadily : but we must try and 
get back to where He stood on that mountain of 
vision, and with Him accept the fact that the king- 
dom of God is a plant of slow growth. Watered 
though it has been by the prayers and tears of the 
faithful through all these centuries, it does not quicken 
its rate. And I think that perhaps one reason why 
we are tempted to grow impatient is that we do not 



THE KINGHOOD OF PATIENCE. 



251 



realize fully the magnitude of the result which the Gos- 
pel contemplates. 

At any rate, Christ could afford to wait and to be patient, 
and so can we. He did not despair, neither need we. 
He predicted success ; on His word, as the testimony 
of His infinite foresight, we may be sure of it. It is not 
for us to grow sick and disheartened and angry at the 
times. Not for us to cry, " Who shall show us any 
good ?" Not for us to say in despair, "The foundations 
are being removed." You and I are to be patient, not 
with the patience of idleness, not in the spirit of help- 
less acquiescence with things as they are, but with the 
patience of hope ; the patience of firm holding by God's 
truth and promises in His word ; the patience of persist- 
ent warfare against sin ; the patience of constant, faithful 
preaching and living of the word of God ; the patience 
of Jesus Christ. The kingdom of Jesus Christ will fol- 
low in due time. Things never looked less like the tri- 
umph of Christ than when Nero was raving and burning 
at Rome, and the Roman Empire was rotting at the 
roots, and John was driven by the storm to desolate 
Patmos. But it was in Patmos that John saw the vision 
of a perfected society which was to be a fact some day ; 
and it was from that vision of the city of God coming 
down out of heaven, that he came to tell the Church of 
all time of the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. 



XVII. 
JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

"For I am the Lord that healeth thee." — Exodus xv. 26. 

When one has escaped from great danger or distress, 
every other feeling is for the moment swallowed up in 
the joy of deliverance. This very joy contributes to 
make any subsequent trouble the harder to bear. 

If the Israelites, in their delight at their newly-won 
freedom, supposed that their troubles were at an end, 
they were soon undeceived. The old conditions in which 
they had been reared did not quit their hold easily. 
Pharaoh was not slow in awaking to a sense of the dis- 
aster to his kingdom involved in the simultaneous mi- 
gration of a slave race of two millions, and was resolved 
to retrieve his mistake ; and so the Israelites had hardly 
gotten clear of Egypt when they found him, like a thirsty 
bloodhound, on their track. That danger was very sum- 
marily disposed of, and Pharaoh put beyond the possi- 
bility of further harm to them or to any one else. Then 
there were great rejoicings, songs and timbrels and 
dances. It was like a second exodus. Two such signal 
escapes do not often occur close together in the history 
of a people. And now they set their faces toward their 
future. The working out of the new national problem 

began, as it always must, on the line of commonplace 
(252) 



JEHO VAH ROPHEKA. 253 

work and daily drudgery. The march commenced over 
the sand with its dry depressions and stunted herbage 
and bare limestone hills. Soon came the danger so 
common to Eastern travel. The water supply failed : 
but they had scarcely time to grow frightened and dis- 
contented ere the wells appeared. Again trouble seemed 
to be at an end. The eager crowd surrounded the cis- 
terns. The water was hastily drawn. Thousands of 
parched lips touched the coveted draught ; and then a 
general cry of disgust and anguish rang through the 
host. Any one who knows what the water of desert 
wells in the East is, knows that the best is bad enough ; 
and can imagine how loathsome this must have been, 
when men and women of no delicate taste were obliged 
to throw it away. 

And strangest of all is the fact, so often repeated in 
this history, that the people did not appear to think 
at all of God, to whom it was but natural that their 
thoughts should turn at once. One would think that 
after two such divine interpositions within the last few 
days, they might have seen a way out of this last diffi- 
culty : but no, they stood there by the wells and cried 
out against Moses, and asked, " Where shall we find 
water?'' 

God has wonderful patience with men. He does not 
expect too much from His new pupils in the school of 
faith. It was evident in this case that the principle of faith 
had to be developed from the very roots ; and therefore 
God at once interposed with a twofold object ; to relieve 
the present distress, and to give an elementary lesson in 



254 JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

faith and obedience. He pointed out a tree which Ke 
bade Moses cast into the water, and the water became 
sweet. 

We need not allegorize this story in order to draw a 
lesson from it. It deals with facts, which, under differ- 
ent forms, are constantly reappearing in all our lives. It 
is a fact, for instance, that the rapid alternations of 
safety and danger, triumph and terror, joy and mourn- 
ing, which marked this stage of Israel's history, mark 
the course of human life in every age. No human expe- 
rience is uniformly joyful or sorrowful. A great triumph 
is succeeded by a great obstacle and sometimes by a 
great defeat. To-night there is the joy of escape from 
bondage : to-morrow the tyrant's chariots are in hot 
pursuit. To-day the Red Sea is passed and Miriam's 
timbrel and song resound over the waters : to-morrow 
come the pangs of thirst : the next day Elim with palms 
and sweet wells : soon the desert and the rock. To-day 
you are prosperous, satisfied, every want met : to-morrow 
you are asking how to win your bread. To-day you 
stride forth with the easy swing of health : to-morrow 
the door of the sick-chamber shuts you in, and you lan- 
guish with weakness and are consumed with fever. To- 
day surrounded with friends and kindred : to-morrow 
the circle is broken, and you are weeping beside your 
dead. So it has been from the foundation of the world ; 
so it will be, until the new order shall have entered, 
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor 
crying. 

But there is another equally constant fact to offset 



JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 255 

this. As we look at this alternation of Elims and Marahs 
in our life, and recognize it as a law of our human expe- 
rience, we find it supplemented by something else which 
is equally a law : and that is the economy of God b\ 
which this alternation is happily adjusted. In othei 
words, I mean this : that if it is a law of our life that joy 
and sorrow succeed each other, it is equally a law of our 
life that God interposes and keeps the joy from corrupt- 
ing and the sorrow from crushing us. If He tempers 
our joy by a sorrow or a danger, He has always a branch 
to cast into the bitter water which our lips refuse, and 
to sweeten it. If sorrow is a part of God's economy, 
healing is equally a part. If the apostle can state it as 
a law of God's administration that He chastens those 
whom He loves, and scourges even* son whom He re- 
ceives, — God states another law in the name by which 
He here commends Himself to Israel : I am Jehovah 
Ropheka, the Lord that healeth thee. And thus we 
find these two ideas side by side in the familiar words 
of the prophet Hosea, " Let us return unto the Lord, 
for He hath torn and He will heal us ; He hath smitten, 
and He will bind us up." 

We have gained very much when we have gotten hold 
of this truth, that human sorrow and human joy are two 
parts of one complex law, the mutual working of which 
is adjusted by heavenly wisdom. We have sure stand, 
ing-ground here, from which we can look calmly forth 
upon the joyful and the sorrowful possibilities of life 
alike. If we had only the divine prophecy, M In this 
world ye shall have tribulation," it would seem to us, 



256 JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

and justly, that life was one-sided and unbalanced, and 
must be thrown out of its orbit into utter confusion 
and wreck by the overwhelming, unremitted pressure 
from one direction. Not so when we read also, " in me 
ye shall have peace." Peace is perfect poise. Life 
takes on proportion and symmetry when we see the 
tribulation and the peace, the bitterness and the sweet- 
ness alike controlled by Jehovah. 

Our ordinary, natural reasoning, and the philosophies 
of life which men construct out of their own brains and 
with the material furnished by their larger or smaller 
experience, do not give us anything corresponding to 
this. To perhaps the majority of minds, sorrow, while 
it is recognized as a constant factor of human life, ap- 
peals as something lawless. They look upon happiness 
as their natural right, and consequently upon every in- 
terruption of happiness as an intrusion, a disorderly 
thing. The idea of an economy of life which deliber- 
ately includes and provides for sorrow, is as strange as it 
is unwelcome. And therefore the idea of an economy 
or law of healing sorrow is equally strange. The allevi- 
ations of sorrow do not, to such minds, obey a law any 
more than the sorrow itself. You hear abundance of 
popular proverbs and sayings to the effect that clouds 
have often silver linings ; that calamity usually stops 
short of the very worst ; that time dulls grief ; that na- 
ture reacts from its depression, and much more of the 
same sort, all which may be more or less true, but which 
do not cover the same ground as this blessed name, 
"Jehovah that healeth thee ": which throw man for his 



JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 257 

compensation for sorrow merely upon nature and cir- 
cumstances. Both are lawless and accidental, the allevi- 
ations no less than the sorrow itself. 

But there is a radical difference between a grief which 
is accidental, and a grief which falls in with happier 
things into an order arranged to make the man purer 
and more blessed. There is a radical difference between 
accidental mitigations, and the firm, wise, tender touch 
of an omnipotent Healer upon a sorrow : and there is a 
radical difference between that conception of sorrow 
which makes it an intrusion and an interruption, and a 
conception which sees both sorrow and healing as parts 
of one divine plan, adjusted by that same divine hand 
all along the line of man's life. It is one thing for a man 
to start out upon a journey through an unknown coun- 
try, taking it for granted that he will be able to pick up 
something somewhere to meet the needs and to repair 
the accidents of the way ; and it is another thing for 
him to undertake the same journey under the auspices 
of one who knows the route, and anticipates the difficul- 
ties, and who has provisions and means of transportation 
to meet him at proper points, and appliances for every 
conceivable disaster. This was the case with Israel. Had 
they started from Egypt trusting to the desert to supply 
their needs as they arose, they would have perished, and 
that very early. Things were as bad as they could be at 
Marah. They must have water, and there was no water. 
And in this as in all other emergencies, when they re- 
ceived help or healing it was not accidental ; it did not 
come through their skilful turning of circumstances to 



258 JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

advantage. No combination of circumstances which 
they could make would have furnished manna ; there 
was no water in such a circumstance as that rock at 
Kadesh : no way out from that writhing mesh of fiery 
serpents which enfolded them as they journeyed toward 
Edom. The help and the healing were parts of the 
same economy with the barren desert and the bitter 
wells. 

God's child, then, has this firm standing-ground ; this 
divine assurance that Jehovah that healeth is identified 
with the whole course of his life : that while that course 
leads beside many a bitter well and dry rock, and through 
many a desert place, he may be sure he shall meet the 
Lord, the Healer at each. 

With the alleviations of sorrow which come in what 
we call the natural order of things, I have therefore 
nothing to do here. That nature has certain recupera- 
tive powers is a familiar fact : that God often uses these 
or other natural means in His own processes of healing, as 
a physician uses for medicine the herbs and flowers which 
he gathers by the roadside, is an equally familiar fact. 
But we are not concerned with the question of means. 
Our text leads us back of the means. That to which 
alone sorrow can grapple securely is not means, but God. 
God, on this occasion, though He uses a branch to 
sweeten the water, also uses it to direct the attention of 
the people to Himself. When He gives Himself a name 
by which they are to know and remember Him all 
through this desert journey, it is not, " the God of the 
branch," nor " the God of the rod," nor " the God of the 



JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 2 $g 

strong east wind/' but simply, " I am Jehovah that healeth 
thee." No matter what means I use. If He had called 
Himself the God of the rod, the people would have de- 
spaired of healing in any case where there was not a 
branch or a rod present. He would have them know 
that healing was in Him, by any means or by no means 
as He might choose. 

And thus it is well for us to bring every bitter experi- 
ence of life at once to God — directly. The fountain of 
healing is there, and there is no need of our taking the 
smallest trouble in seeking any lower source of comfort. 
If you live close beside a great lake of fresh, cold water, 
and want a cupful to drink, you do not hesitate to take 
it from the lake because it is so large. The lake which 
can fill your largest reservoir can certainly fill your cup, 
and Jehovah, who can heal your worst affliction, can cer- 
tainly heal your lightest one. Since the great Physician 
thus puts Himself at your disposal, you may as well sub- 
mit every case to Him, and not wait until you are driven 
to Him by some great emergency where no one else can 
help you. God is not like certain great medical authori- 
ties who leave all minor maladies to subordinates and 
hold themselves in reserve merely for consultation on 
cases of life and death. He wrought the great miracle at 
Marah, not only to relieve the people's thirst on that oc- 
casion, but to encourage them to seek His help in smaller 
matters. He is the Lord that healeth thee ; and so He 
takes thee with all thy maladies great and small under 
His care, and would have thee cast all thy care upon 
Him, for He careth for thee. And if we do not get in 



2 6o JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

the way of seeking God's healing in little troubles, we 
shall not so easily find it in great ones. The man who 
has trodden a mountain-path every day for years in the 
course of his ordinary toil, is the one who knows how to 
thread it in the darkness of midnight when his life de- 
pends upon his sure footing. 

And that midnight darkness, that condition in which 
a man is alone with God and his own bitterness of soul, 
where no human help or sympathy or utterance is of any 
avail,. where no diversion is possible, that, I say, is a not 
uncommon experience of God's children, in the presence 
of which one learns, often for the first time, what possi- 
bilities of healing are hidden in God. Do you remem- 
ber those words in the ninety-fourth Psalm, " In the 
multitude of my thoughts within me, Thy comforts de- 
light my soul " ? Do you suppose that this means that 
the Psalmist reasoned out his way to comfort with a 
multitude of thoughts? Not so. There is a graphic 
little picture in those words. They mean literally, " in 
the multitude of my tangled or intertwined thoughts," a 
confused mass of thoughts like the interlacing twigs and 
boughs of a tree swept by a tempest. His thoughts are 
too confused to think out anything. That suggests a 
common feature of sorrow. When a great calamity has 
overtaken one, the first experience, and a dreadful one it 
is, is that of utter confusion, of inability to think con- 
nectedly at all. The man is simply driven like a leaf be- 
fore the storm. Now he is hopeless, now desperate. 
He is as one in a jungle and cannot cut his way out. It 
is there, amid the multitude of tangled, conflicting 



JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 26 1 

thoughts, that he finds healing if he can get hold on God. 
It is a comfort if he can only realize that God is in the 
dark with him. He does not trouble himself much 
about the mode of the comfort. He merely clings to 
God and finds the more comfort the closer he gets to 
Him. In the midst of a severe and complicated disease 
one does not try to comprehend the medical problems 
involved in his case. His thought narrows down to his 
doctor. It is his business to know the problems and 
their solution ; and it is better for the patient when he 
can dismiss all thought about those. He is always the 
worse for trying to keep track of his own case. 

That is one element of the sweetness which God 
throws into our Marahs — that element of simple rest 
in Him. God sometimes reduces a man to terrible 
straits so that he may learn that lesson. The branch 
which He throws in is this : " Rest in the Lord and 
wait patiently for Him." When one is in such confu- 
sion and bewilderment, a great deal of the distress is 
thrown off in the throwing off of all responsibility for 
the way out. Helplessness under the touch of the great 
Healer is converted into restfulness. Many years ago, 
while in Rome, I went down into the Catacombs. I had 
not gone five feet from the entrance when I saw that if 
I should try to find my way back, I should be hopeless- 
ly lost. Passages opened out on every side, and crossed 
and interlaced, and my life was literally in the hands of 
the cowled monk who led the way with his lighted taper. 
But that was a relief. Having no responsibility for find- 
ing the way, and having faith in my guide, I could give 



262 JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

myself up to the impression of the place. There is a 
beautiful passage in the one hundred and forty-second 
Psalm which brings out this truth. The Psalm is as- 
cribed to David when he was fleeing from Saul's perse- 
cution and wandering in a labyrinth of caves and secret 
paths. " When my spirit is overwhelmed within me, 
Thou knowest my path." Few things are more painful 
or humiliating than the sense of having lost the way. 
The sweetening branch then is just this blessed con- 
sciousness that divine omniscience knows the path : that 
the knowledge is with one who knows just how to use it, 
who knows the path through, the path out, knows what 
the trend of the trouble is and what its meaning is. 
Thou knowest my path. No matter whether I know it 
or not. My ignorance is bliss, provided it can rest on 
Thy wisdom. I am no longer confused or distracted 
when I know that Thou art in the way before me, and 
can hear Thee say, " I am the Lord that healeth thee." 

But then, while God reveals Himself as the ultimate 
source of all comfort and healing, He does not always 
withdraw from us secondary sources of help. The great 
Healer knoweth the frame of His patients. All constitu- 
tions will not stand the same treatment, and God's love 
in healing is balanced by His wisdom in applying reme- 
dies. One of the most familiar of these secondary agen- 
cies is human sympathy. Some men God can detach 
entirely from human help and set them to work out the 
hard problem of sorrow with Him alone. He could do 
so with Job. He not only swept away one material 
comfort after another, but He withdrew him from hu- 



JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 263 

man sympathy. The very wife of his bosom was ap- 
palled at his lot and refused to face it and work it out 
with him : and his three friends only aggravated his tor- 
ment. God knew the man with whom He was dealing, 
and could let him beat round wildly for a time, held 
only by a single thought, God did it, knowing that by 
that his faith would mount by and by to victory and to 
clearer vision. But God could not have dealt with every 
man in that way. Christ did not deal so with Thomas 
the doubter: and I think that, in the great majority of 
cases, our Healer makes use of the sympathy of our fel- 
low-men as a branch with which to sweeten our Marahs. 
And, say what we will of the impotence of human words 
to reach the depth of great sorrow, human sympathy and 
human help are sweet, and help to make the burden 
lighter. We may not reject them. They are the choice 
medicine of the Lord that healeth. Not many days ago 
I received a letter from a dear friend who had recently 
suffered a terrible bereavement, and his words are an ex- 
pressive comment on this truth, especially as he is one 
of those strong, thoroughly-tempered natures who would 
face such a fact boldly and fight his way through it. " I 
thank you with all my heart for the hand which you 
reach out to me in the dark. I never knew till now the 
real worth of the love of men. It takes on toward God 
— this human leading of hearts which one believes in 
and loves." Yes, we may honestly thank God for the 
branches of human love which bend down over the bit- 
ter springs. God does not blame us for craving this. 
He does indeed aim to teach us that He alone is suffi- 



264 JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

cient for us, but He leads us up to that knowledge gen- 
tly and by the touch of brothers' hands. 

But let us not forget the other great truth of this 
story, a truth quite as important as the first, and perhaps 
quite as hard to learn ; and that is, that God's healing is 
a lesson no less than a comfort. After God had showed 
Moses how to make the waters of Marah sweet, we read 
that " he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and 
there he proved them, and said, i If thou wilt diligently 
hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do 
that which is right in His sight, and wilt give ear to His 
commandments, and wilt keep all His statutes, I will 
put none of these diseases upon thee which I have put 
upon the Egyptians : for I am the Lord that healeth 
thee.' " There was a danger in the freedom of the Is- 
raelites. The reaction of feeling upon the deliverance 
from bondage would naturally tend to throw the idea 
of masterdom into the shade. From hard servitude the 
stride to lawlessness was very easy. And hence you see 
that God insists on obedience in contrast with the loos- 
ened bonds of Egypt. He did not long delay warning 
them against the thought that they had no master, now 
that Pharaoh's yoke was removed. The new economy 
was to be, as really as the old, an economy of service, 
fidelity, obedience, only to a better and kinder master. 
How this feature of the story chimes in with the words 
of the Saviour as He calls men to rest from the heavy 
burden and weariness of sin, but still to take on them- 
selves His yoke and His burden. 

God couples even His tenderness with His law. Into 



JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 2 6$ 

His most affectionate, sympathetic, gentle dealing with 
men, He introduces the claims and the obligations 
of duty. The law is, as the Psalmist puts it, like the 
sun in the heavens. "There is nothing hid from the heat 
thereof." And therefore this wonderful lesson of God's 
healing is coupled with a lesson of obedience and a 
warning against neglect of duty. The aim of a phy- 
sician's treatment is not merely to relieve his patient 
from pain. It is, further, to get him on his feet for 
active duty. God did not sweeten the waters of Marah 
in order that the people might stay there. Marah was 
only a stage on the way to Canaan ; and the draught at 
the sweetened spring was but to give strength for a long 
march. And God never heals His people simply to 
make them easy. If He takes off a load, it is that they 
may walk the better in the way of His commandments. 
We limit too much the meaning of that good old word 
" comfort " which God uses so often. In our minds it 
is too much identified with ease and rest and satisfaction 
with the present. Whereas the original word has a nerv- 
ous, vigorous force, a meaning of bracing and strength- 
ening. The Holy Spirit in His office of Comforter, does 
not come to lull us to repose. It is the Comforter who 
reproves the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judg- 
ment. The idea conveyed by " comfort " is tonic as 
well as restful. God comforts us with His healing that 
we may take up His work, and address ourselves vigor- 
ously to faith and prayer and obedience. That is heal- 
ing indeed which not only frees the patient from pain, 
but makes him a living, active power. Indeed God's 

12 



2 66 JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

healing, as many of you know very well, does not always 
take away pain. God healed Paul of the thorn in the 
flesh, but He did not remove the thorn. His healing 
lay in the gift of His grace to bear the thorn ; and 
many a one rises up from beside the well which God 
has sweetened for him, strengthened and refreshed in- 
deed, girding up his loins and grasping his staff, and 
striking out with a firm step into the desert, yet know- 
ing full well that he will carry that old heartache to the 
very end of the journey — that longing for " the touch 
of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is 
still." God's healing enables him to work well and faith- 
fully and even cheerfully in spite of the aching heart. 
Most of us have known something of sickness, not a 
few of us of dangerous sickness. We are often reminded 
of the lesson and the warning of the sickness, and we 
have little difficulty in reading that lesson : but I won- 
der if we as readily apprehend the lesson of recovery. 
Are we not sometimes blinded by the joy of recovery 
to its teaching ? Ah, my friends, the lesson of Marah 
is as good a one for us to-day as it was to the murmur- 
ing Israelites. Whatever God may say to us by sickness, 
when He comes to us as the Lord of healing He says, 
" I will raise thee up that thou mayst do that which is 
right in my sight ; that thou mayst give ear to my com- 
mandments and keep my statutes." You remember 
how forcibly this is put in the one hundred and six- 
teenth Psalm. The writer tells how the sorrows of 
death compassed him : how he was brought low and God 
helped him ; and then he breaks out, " Return unto thy 



JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 267 

rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully 
with thee. For Thou hast delivered my soul from 
death, mine eyes from tears and my feet from falling; 
I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living." 
I have been saved from the land of the shadow of 
death : it is that I may walk in the path of obedience 
in the land of the living. 

This, then, is the teaching of the bitter spring. We 
live under an economy of which sorrow is a part, but of 
which God's healing is also a part. We are under the 
care of Jehovah that healeth ; a wise healer, a tender 
healer, a thorough healer. The alternation of joy and 
sorrow in our life is not accidental, it obeys a law ; it is 
all regulated, the joy and the sorrow alike, by infinite 
wisdom and infinite love. Healing has a lesson as well 
as sorrow ; it is not an end unto itself, not an encourage- 
ment to indolence and slackness, but a monition point- 
ing us to make use of recovered tone and strength on 
the path of duty and ministry. God, in calling Himself 
our healer, appeals to no sickly sentiment in us. Heal- 
ing means more toil and more burdens and more con- 
flict, and these will continue to the end. But let us 
remember that God never forgets to give rest along the 
road, and refreshment at the right places to His faithful 
ones. Even on earth there will be intervals of sweet 
rest, though the desert lie on beyond. After Marah 
came Elim with palms and abundant wells, shade and 
flowing waters, and they were suffered to encamp 
there by the wells and to stay awhile. By and by the 
desert will be passed, the palms of the heavenly Elim 



268 JEHOVAH ROPHEKA. 

will rise into view, and the faithful shall walk with 
the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne, who shall 
lead them to living fountains of waters, and God — the 
Lord that healeth — shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes. 



XVIII. 
SELF-WINNING. 

"In your patience ye shall win your souls" — Luke 
xxi. 19. 

" In your patience possess ye your souls " is the fa- 
miliar reading of this verse. The words have passed 
into a proverb — " Possess your souls in patience." But 
have you ever stopped to think what meaning that 
phrase conveys ? A very vague one, I think you will 
find. What definite thought do you get from that — 
" possess your soul in patience ? " On the other hand, 
the true rendering of the text gives a very clear and 
sharp and almost startling statement : Ye shall win your 
souls in your patience. Leading your life in patience, 
you shall save yourself : you shall get your life into your 
own power : you shall save it out of the throng of wreck- 
ing forces which encompass it. 

Only, it comes to us, perhaps, with a flavor of novelty 
that a man must win his own soul. Is it not a contra- 
diction in terms ? If one's soul is his own, why must it 
be won ? We hear a good deal, and rightly, about the 
Christian duty of winning souls — our neighbors' souls. 
Scripture tells us that " he that winneth souls is wise." 
Doubtless you and I have a duty to the souls of our 
neighbors, but that is not what Christ is talking about 

here. It is our duty to our own souls ; and if winning 

(269) 



270 SELF- WINNING. 

souls is a mark of wisdom, surely it is the highest wis- 
dom for a man to win his own soul if that must needs 
be done ; not only for his own safety and happiness, but 
as the indispensable condition of winning other souls. 

Does this seem strange to you ? Look at it for a 
moment. Popular saws often tell us truths, though 
quite as often, possibly, they tell falsehoods. We have 
a common saying that such a man is afraid to say his 
soul is his own. There is a case where we distinctly 
recognize the fact that a man has not won his own soul. 
He dares not assert it. He has no such possession of 
his deepest self as to make it tell in the conflict with 
other men. His inner life is not gathered up and massed 
in convictions which he can wield as weapons and make 
men feel their edge. He is possessed by other men's 
convictions, carried their way, a mere shuttlecock obey- 
ing the blow of the racquet from either side. His soul 
is not his own. 

Now here, as in so many other cases, our Lord is 
simply using a familiar and commonplace truth. The 
peculiarity of His teaching is that He always sets these 
commonplace truths in a new and startling light ; so 
that the truths themselves seem strange to us because 
their applications are novel. 

Why, is it not true, and do you not know very well 
that a man's self — all that makes him a man — has to be 
won out of a mass of circumstances which would anni- 
hilate him if they could ? Do you not know very well 
that such winning is not once and for all, not of the 
nature of a sharp, quickly-gained, decisive victory, but 



SELF- WINNING. 2 7 1 

rather through patient, long toil and struggle and disci- 
pline ? Take the life on its physical side. There is a 
healthy, well-developed babe. All the possibilities of 
manhood are in him. Thirty years hence he will be a 
model of manly strength. Hard matter will yield at 
his firm grasp or well-directed blow. His healthy frame 
with its quickly- bounding pulses, will throw off the 
sickly influences of the atmosphere. His exuberant 
energy will carry him through days and nights of severe 
toil and exposure. But now these are only possibilities. 
Now, healthy and vigorous though he is, he is only a 
healthy and vigorous babe, whom a child of five years 
might easily stifle. The strength of manhood has to be 
won, through the slow, gradual knitting of bone and 
muscle, the protection of stronger arms, the hard teach- 
ing which comes through falls and bruises. He wins 
his way to the power of locomotion, first to creeping, 
then to walking, then to running. 

So it is with other faculties, beginning from the very 
roots of the physical life, and all the way up to the 
faculties which border on the spiritual region. This 
baby has to learn to see. He has eyes, sound, clear, 
lovely orbs into which a mother's eye looks as into deep 
wells of love, but when he emerges into consciousness 
and begins to take note of things around him, hold up 
a ball before him, and see how aimless is his grasp at it. 
His eye has not yet learned to calculate distances. You 
know how the blind, when restored to sight, have to 
learn to see : sight and seeing are not the same things. 
Sight is a gift of nature. Seeing has to be won." That 



272 



SELF- WINNING. 



blind man whom Jesus healed did not at once receive 
power to see. At the first touch he said, " I see men, 
for I behold them as trees, walking," in vague outline, 
confused, like the blending of trees in a grove. When 
Jesus laid His hand upon him a second time, he saw all 
things clearly. We see the same truth as related to 
special training of the senses. We have all heard the 
story of " eyes and no eyes." One man will see the mate- 
rial for a volume where another sees nothing but stocks 
and stones. You go up into the northern woods, and 
as the night settles down, the whole forest is vocal. To 
you it is a hopeless chaos of sounds ; but the trained 
ear of the woodman will pick out this and that sound 
and tell you what animal or insect or bird makes it. 
The natural, untrained ear does not catch the beautiful 
modulations and harmonies of a symphony. The hand 
which brings melody out of the piano or organ or viol 
must be long and patiently trained. It is needless to 
multiply illustrations. You see that, on the side of 
the senses and of the physical being generally, power 
and effectiveness have to be won. They are not born 
with the man. There is no royal road to them either. 
It is through patience and toil that a man wins practiced 
perception and deft manipulation. 

Now the law does not hold any the less when we get 
down to the core of the man, this which makes a distinct 
self. Power and gifts are latent in that self or soul, but 
they are only possibilities. I think we have all been 
impressed with the unused mental and moral forces in 
certain men. We have all seen men with the instincts 



SELF- WINNING. 



273 



and powers of artists or poets, who yet had no mastery 
over their power. They could not use it. The untrained 
hand could not embody the vigorous conception of the 
brain : the untrained ear and pen could not cast the 
poetic thought into verse. They had not won their 
own native powers. And, going still deeper, there is 
that moral something which we call self-mastery. In 
how many do you see it ? How many men do you see 
who make their thoughts work on given lines ; who 
have their hand on the gates which shut out vain and 
wicked thoughts ; in whom the whole moral and spirit- 
ual nature is obedient to law, and is marshalled and 
massed and directed by a supreme will ? We say a man 
is self-possessed. What do we mean by that, but that 
there resides in the man a power which holds all his 
faculties at command, and brings them to bear in spite 
of all distractions ? There can be no better phrase to 
express it. He possesses himself. He can do what he 
will with that side of the self which he chooses to use. 
Nothing takes away his courage. He has that in pos- 
session. Excitement and tumult do not take away the 
clearness of his mental vision. He keeps his eye on his 
theme. He has possession of his tongue. No confusion 
takes from him the power of lucid speech : and, above 
all, that deep-lying personality of the man is not thrown 
off its feet. It asserts itself. Men as they look and 
listen, yea, as they rave, say, " The man is himself. He 
is not what our threats or our tumult or our opposition 
make him. We cannot take his manhood away from 

him. He has himself in hand. He is self-possessed." 
12* 



274 



SELF- WINNING. 



And all this comes through a long and severe disci- 
pline, which is all vain without patience. Patience is 
the element in which discipline lives and thrives. It is 
only through patience that natural endowment is con- 
verted into possession and mastery. 

Natural endowment is only possibility. It is some- 
thing which a man has, and yet does not have until 
he wins it. So in the spiritual realm. Spiritual self- 
mastery, full command of the deepest self, possession of 
all the soul's resources of faith and hope and sanctified 
will — all are born of discipline and struggle working in 
the atmosphere of patience. They have to be won. 
Man, along the whole scale of his being, from its lowest 
physical point up to the very acme of his spiritual life, 
is in contact with forces which oppose and thwart the 
possession and masterdom of self. Leave him passively 
to nature, and she will make short work with him. Ni- 
agaras and Atlantics will suck him down and sweep him 
away. Her fire will consume and her frost petrify him. If 
man has by constitution a principle of self-determination, 
a way of his own, so has Nature ; and Nature, no less 
than man, likes to have its own way. It will possess if 
it be not possessed. It will master if it be not mastered. 

" Like us, the lightning fires 

Love to have scope and play. 
The stream, like us, desires 

An unimpeded way. 
Like us the Libyan wind delights to roam at large. 
Nature, with equal mind, 

Sees all her sons at play ; 
Sees man control the wind, 

The wind sweep man away." 



SELF- WINNING. 



275 



Man's self must develop powers of resistance and con- 
trol. It must be so completely in hand that he can say 
to wind and water, " You shall not possess me and carry 
me whither you will. Rather shall you do my bidding, 
and grind my corn, and turn my lathe, and carry me 
whither I will." " Nature, red in tooth and claw," roars 
and pants and rages after him. He must win his life 
from her jaws. 

And no less does the truth hold higher up. As we 
follow human nature upward, it is only the antagonists 
that change. The contact and the conflict are perpetu- 
ated. The Bible is full of this. It may indeed be said 
that the underlying truth of the whole Bible, working 
itself out through the successive stages of history and 
the infinite varieties of human experience, is, how shall a 
man win his own soul ? A whole economy of secret, 
spiritual forces is arrayed against this consummation. 
Hence it is that Paul says, " We that are in this taber- 
nacle do groan." Hence we are told of a wrestle which 
is not with flesh and blood, but with spiritual hosts ; 
marshalled and organized evil in the spiritual realm ; 
princes of darkness. So too our Lord told Peter of an 
unseen, terrible power, fired with malignant desire to 
sift him as wheat. And under the stress of this fact, 
the whole current of New Testament teaching settles 
down into one sharply-defined channel ; that spiritual 
mastery, self-possession, self-wielding, are the outcome 
only of patient effort and discipline protracted up to the 
very end. Accordingly we hear an apostle, far on in his 
Christian career, saying, "I keep my body under." I 



276 SELF- WINNING. 

treat it as the boxer does his adversary, bruising it into 
subjection, lest after having held out to others the hope 
of spiritual victory, I should become a castaway. Re- 
ligious sentimentalists tell us of a condition where spirit- 
ual conflict ceases. Do not believe that hollow delu- 
sion. The man who fancies he has reached such a stage 
as that, displays his ignorance instead of the depth of 
his piety. He is walking on enchanted ground, in an at- 
mosphere of falsehood, and is the very one to be most 
easily betrayed into sin. I do not mean that Christian 
experience is all fight and agony. By no means. It 
has its rest, and its sweetness : but you remember our 
Lord's blessed invitation to the weary and heavy laden, 
" Come to me. I will give you rest ": but also, " Take 
my yoke and learn of me, and ye shall find rest, rest 
unto your souls." Rest is a gift, but it is also some 
thing to be won. God, when He commences the edu- 
cation and salvation of a soul, begins by centring it : by 
giving it a firm resting-place ; but He puts the soul there 
as on a basis from which to work out something, and 
there is another and a deeper rest than that of forgiven 
sin, which a man finds in that working out ; in that 
struggle for dominion over self and the world ; in that 
resistance of the flesh and of the devil. 

Look at these words of our Lord which precede the 
text. See what a fearful campaign is mapped out for 
these disciples of His. War and natural convulsion in 
the earth ; the machinery of civil government arrayed 
against the faith ; domestic affection changed to gall ; 
kindred turned into persecutors ; hatred from every 



SELF- WINNING. 



277 



quarter. But you see the point on which Christ fixes 
the disciples' attention. It is not how all this persecu- 
tion and sorrow are going to affect fortune and life and 
domestic relations. That needs no comment. It is not 
how the disciple is going to be able to break the force 
of these blows. He will not be able to break it. It may 
put an end to his life. But it is what the disciple is go- 
ing to win and bring out of it all. Something is to be 
suffered. He does not conceal that : but something, 
and that the greatest thing, is to be won. 

And that is the point for us to consider no less than 
for those disciples; because our life, and every Christian 
life, if not assailed by the troubles which are predicted 
here, has to make head against obstacles of some sort. 
The life never loses the character of a conflict though 
the enemies change ; and the enemies do not all change 
either. The world, the flesh, the devil, take on new 
forms with the new ages, but they beset the nineteenth- 
century Christians as they did the Saviour in the wilder- 
ness. Let us have it clearly before us what we are aiming 
at. If we are true to our Lord's ideal, we are not aim- 
ing chiefly to keep clear of trouble, to cushion ourselves 
against the shock of disaster: not to lose as few friends 
as possible ; not to spare ourselves loss of caste ; not to 
go through with the sacrifice of the fewest dollars ; not 
to avoid as many discomforts and humiliations as possi- 
ble. If, I say, we are true to our Lord's ideal, our 
first aim in life is to make Christian manhood. Amid all 
the shocks and disappointments and cruelties of time, 
Christ never allows us to lose sight of that. The fact 



278 SELF- WINNING. 

that a man lives in the midst of trouble and confusion 
does not excuse him from the effort to win his own soul, 
to become a man in Christ Jesus. The way to this lies 
straight through the trouble and confusion, as our Lord's 
words very clearly show. Judicial ban, domestic hatred, 
social disturbance, convulsions of nature, — through all, 
in all, ye shall win your souls. The conflict does not 
mean first getting the better of the men who trouble 
you ; adjusting the circumstances which impede your 
business and your prosperity ; getting your party into 
power in politics. It means, first of all, a rightly-pointed 
self. It means a clean heart and a right spirit. It means 
an honest fight with besetting sins and a victory over 
passion. You are more important than your circum- 
stances. It is more important that your soul should be 
saved than that you should save your fortune. It is 
more important that you should be a man strong in faith 
and pure in character than that your bed should be soft 
and your table luxurious. 

The great feature of this text is that Christ points 
us away from circumstances to souls. You stand some 
day by the ocean swept with a tempest. It is a grand 
spectacle. A score of things in the clouds and in the 
waves appeal to you. You mark the height of the bil- 
lows, their tremendous volume and swiftness and power, 
their mad struggle round the sunken reefs ; but after all 
it is not the grandeur or the terror of the scene which 
most enchains you. Your interest is concentrated on 
that ship yonder. You forget the spectacle of the mad- 
dened ocean as you watch her fight with it. The ques- 



SELF- WINNING. 



2/9 



tion which fills your mind is not how long the storm is 
going to continue, or whether it is likely to become 
more severe. It is whether the ship will ride out the 
gale. And so all circumstances take their character 
from their relation to man's soul. The question is 
whether the man will ride out the storm of circum- 
stance ; the whole significance of circumstance turns on 
whether it will conquer the man or be conquered by 
him ; whether it will swallow up the soul, or whether 
the man will bring his soul alive and entire out of the 
tempest. This is the way in which Christ, as He is 
pictured in the text, looks out upon that horrible tem- 
pest of blood and fire ; and this is the attitude of the 
whole Bible toward the struggle and convulsion of this 
world. Through it all God has His eye on man's moral 
destiny. To us, often, the principal things are the war 
and the confusion, the dislocation and the overturning. 
To Him the principal thing is the destiny of that soul in 
the midst of the storm. Will the man win his soul or not? 
Circumstances will adjust themselves if men are right. 
The great struggle in God's eyes is not between parties 
or sects or opinions. It is between the soul and the 
world. Victory is the man's overcoming the world ; not 
one side of the world getting the better of the other; 
not the victory of the man's native force of will and 
physical power over the things which assail his fortune 
or his reputation, but the perfecting of his spiritual man- 
hood in the teeth of all the loss and damage and pain 
which this world can bring to him. You and I will win 
this battle if we shall win our souls. If we shall go 



280 SELF- WINNING, 

through all, gaining in self-mastery, in faith, in love to 
Christ, in conformity to the character of Christ, the end 
will not be escape, but victory. In your patience, ye 
shall win your souls. 

And that enters into the true conception of patience. 
Patience is active as well as passive. It includes the 
persistent energy which wins no less than the submis- 
siveness which bears. The popular conception of pa- 
tience is too narrow. One is always tempted to smile 
at the popular phrase, "As patient as Job," applied to a 
man who submits to trouble without murmuring. For, 
in this aspect, Job's patience is not a model. Job was 
impatient. He chafed under his trouble, not so much 
indeed at his bodily suffering as at his inability to under- 
stand what God meant by it ; and he murmured, and 
impugned God's justice, and well-nigh blasphemed in 
his frenzied wrestle with this problem. And yet the 
core of this struggle reveals the very truth we are illus- 
trating. The man's thought was absorbed, not by the 
relations of this calamity to his flocks and herds and 
family and health, but by its relations to himself as a 
son of God and a believer in God. His fear centred in 
the possibility that God had forsaken his soul : and Job's 
patience appears in his holding fast by that thought, 
and in his steadily fighting his way toward God through 
all that agony, even though at times he raved at the Al- 
mighty. He clung to the hand that smote him, even 
while he struck at it, as the only hand which could un- 
lock the mystery. He pressed his way through the 
darkness, groping after God. If he could but see God ! 






SELF- WINNING. 28 1 

If he could but come into court with God and make his 
plea to His face ! If God would only speak to him ! And 
at last he prevailed. God did speak to him. Job's soul 
was calmed, though it was humbled to the dust. He 
won his soul in his patience. 

So then, I repeat, the patience in which we shall win 
our souls is not mere passive submission to circumstances. 
It is not drifting at the mercy of circumstance and drift- 
ing uncomplainingly. A man does not win his soul by 
merely not complaining. The patience which Christ 
means is a productive force ; a force which inspires a 
desperate and persistent fight for spiritual manhood ; a 
force which makes a victorious man, and not a mere pet- 
rifaction insensible to " the slings and arrows of outrage- 
ous fortune." 

For you and I are not victors if we do not bring some- 
thing out of this struggle with adverse circumstance ; and 
what we save out of it will finally determine the point 
whether we have all along been in right or wrong rela- 
tions to the events of our life. A great battle is raging. 
There is a fort which is the key to the whole position. 
Whichever side can win and hold that, is victor. Here, 
then, the general masses his troops. Other parts of the 
field are carried by the enemy. The outposts are driven 
in. The batteries are captured. Troops cannot be spared 
for these. Everything is concentrated upon that fort, 
and at last it is taken. The dead and dying lie in heaps 
round it, but the flag waves over it. It has been taken 
at the sacrifice of minor positions, but these are of no ac- 
count now. The enemy will abandon those of his own 



282 SELF- WINNING. 

accord. He has nothing to gain by holding them any 
more. They are commanded by the superior post ; and in 
the light of the fact that the general holds the point from 
which he can command the whole field and dictate terms, 
his former dealing with the inferior positions is explained 
and justified. He could afford to sacrifice them for the 
sake of holding the key to the field. The lesser thing 
was wisely given up for the greater. Well for us if we 
can carry that principle into our spiritual warfare. Well 
for us if we shall clearly recognize the soul as the key to 
the position. Well for us if we can wholly take in the 
meaning of the words, " What shall it profit a man if he 
shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " Get 
out of this struggle unscathed in fortune and in repu- 
tation ; save for yourself the worldly advantage ; let the 
soul take care of itself, and the great day of decision 
shall show forth your wisdom or your folly. You shall 
gain the world and its honors and comforts only to leave 
them behind. If you shall not have won your own soul, 
what will be left? Winning your soul, you will have 
won all. These minor positions you have let go. Well, 
you will have proved then that you could live and fight 
without them. You will have proved then that they 
are in no sense necessary to your real success : you will 
have proved yourself their master by being able to dis- 
pense with them : and meanwhile you will have proved 
yourself victor by having brought out of the fight that 
which puts you in eternal possession of heaven, and of 
the fellowship of God and of angels. 

Perhaps life, this life, will have been yielded up. None 



SELF-WINNING. 283 

the less you will have saved your life in losing it. In 
your patience ye shall win your souls. 

My brethren, if you shall keep this object before you 
in your daily fight with the world, it will greatly simplify 
your life. If our eyes are directed mainly upon the 
clashing elements around us we shall easily become con- 
fused. The multitude and the contradiction of the ad- 
justments they require, will embarrass us hopelessly. But 
we have Christ's word for it, " But one thing is needful." 
We have the Psalmist's word for it, " One thing have I 
desired of the Lord, that will I seek after." 

The day on which business-care or domestic trouble 
or social confusion calls off your thought from the pur- 
pose of winning your own soul, is the day on which the 
enemy gains, and you begin to go back from victory. 
This is not a mere dictate of selfishness. Christ com- 
mends to you no selfish principle when He bids you win 
your own soul. In such winning, in such making of Christ- 
like manhood, you become a power to draw others into 
the circle of your influence. The more you become like 
Christ, the richer you make the world. 

And note, once more, that these words have the char- 
acter of a rich and consolatory promise. Patience here, 
hard, steady fighting, uncomplaining endurance, but, 
then, winning : the goal and the crown. The true 
measure of the things of this life is the life of eternity. 
Paul understood that when he said, " I count all things 
but loss if I may win Christ ": when he called the afflic- 
tions of this present time light and momentary compared 
with the far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 



284 SELF- WINNING. 

Just here there comes to me a beautiful passage of Jere- 
my Taylor, and with this I will leave the subject with 
you. " Well, let the world have its course, I am con- 
tent to bear it : God's will be done : let the sea be troub- 
led ; let the waves thereof roar ; let the winds of af- 
fliction blow ; let the waters of sorrows rush upon me ; 
let the darkness of grief and heaviness compass me 
about ; yet will I not be afraid ; these storms will blow 
over ; these winds will be laid ; these waves will fall ; 
this tempest cannot last long ; and these clouds shall be 
dispelled : whatsoever I suffer here shall shortly have an 
end. I shall not suffer eternally ; come the worst that 
can come, death will put an end to all my sorrows and 
miseries. Lord, grant me patience here and ease here- 
after! I will suffer patiently whatsoever can happen, 
and shall endeavor to do nothing against my conscience 
and displeasing unto Thee ; for all is safe and sure with 
him who is certain and sure of a blessed Eternity." 



XIX. 

THE CANKERED YEARS. 

" And I will restore unto you the years that the locust 
hath eaten, the cauker-wor?n and the caterpillar 
and the palmer-worm, my great army which T 
sent amo7ig you. And ye shall eat in pie?ity and 
be satisfied, and shall praise the name of the Lord 
your God that hath dealt wondrously with you ; 
and my people shall never be ashamed." — JOEL ii. 
25, 26. 

THE reign of Uzziah, King of Judah, was marked by 
a frightful visitation of locusts. You will find a most 
graphic description of this plague in the second chapter 
of the prophecy. The ground where they browse is 
scorched as with fire. The land which lay before them 
as the garden of Eden, lies behind them a desolate wil- 
derness. The noise of their flight is as the noise of 
chariots on the tops of the mountains. The sound of 
their eating is as the crackling of fire amid stubble. 
They run upon the city walls, they climb upon the houses, 
they enter in at the latticed windows like a thief. 

But it is the moral and not the picturesque aspect of 
this visitation which is uppermost in the prophet's mind. 
He plainly proclaims it as a punishment for the people's 
sins and as a call to repentance. If they shall repent, he 
promises a blessing which shall amply atone for past 

suffering. " The Lord will be jealous for His land and 

(285) 



286 THE CANKERED YEARS. 

will pity His people. Yea, the Lord will answer and 
say unto His people, ' Behold, I will send you corn and 
wine and oil, and ye shall be satisfied therewith. And 
I will restore to you again the years that the locust hath 
eaten, the canker-worm and the caterpillar and the 
palmer-worm, my great army which I sent among you.' ' 

I am going to speak to you this morning about the 
canker-eaten years and the way in which God restores 
them. For wasted and blasted years are a fact in most 
human lives. Few of us, I take it, can look back, even 
from the stand-point of mid-age, without being startled 
and humbled at the number and size of the bare spots 
scattered over the area of his years. Some one has 
made a computation on the basis of a life of seventy 
years, according to which, deducting the first twenty 
years as a time of preparation, deducting the time con- 
sumed by sleep and by illness, and appropriated to 
recreation, eating, and the general care of the body, 
about eleven years of solid working-time are allotted to 
him who completes threescore and ten years. Possibly 
the computation may not be altogether fair ; but sup. 
pose we allow twenty solid years instead of eleven, 
and patch them with the large areas of squandered 
time which mark the life of the average man, the solid 
margins are fearfully narrow. 

And the appalling thing about this waste is not the 
large fragments which are struck out by sickness or by 
accident, without any responsibility of ours. It is the 
years which have been eaten up by little, scarcely appre- 
ciable agencies like a caterpillar or a canker-worm. Years 



THE CANKERED YEARS. 2 %J 

which have gone, frittered away, we do not know how, 
and for which we have nothing whatever to show : 
years devoured in trifles, escaped, like subtle vapor, in 
musing and brooding over something we meant to do, 
but which we never did : years that fleeted, as on the 
wings of a hurricane, in the wild rush of dissipation, and 
out of which are left only the broken strains of old 
songs, and a few dry leaves of withered garlands. There 
they lie back in the past, in the sad light of a sinking 
sun, precious, golden spaces, teeming with possibilities 
of good, tracts of rich soil, on which we note the aimless 
traces of our idle feet, as we lounged with our eyes at 
the ends of the earth : lo, they are blighted and bare 
now, as though the army of locusts had swept over them. 
How late we are in learning that time slips through our 
fingers faster than pennies : in learning what grand har- 
vests are to be reaped from husbanded minutes. We 
begin to economize time as the penitent spendthrift 
does money, only when he sees the bottom of the chest 
between the scanty pieces. 

The exquisitely bitter thought in this vision of wasted 
years is that of our own share in the desolation ; and 
when our eyes are once fairly opened to the waste, our 
first impulse is to cast about for some method of restora- 
tion. We see the man taxing body and brain to acquire 
the knowledge and the mental discipline which he ought 
to have acquired in youth. We see the pardoned crim- 
inal exerting every energy to regain the confidence for- 
feited by his crime. We see old age straining its fail- 
ing strength to amass the competence which should 



288 THE CANKERED YEARS. 

have been won through the energy and economy of 
manhood ; and the dying man in agony to compass, by 
a late repentance, the moral results which should have 
been the chief aim of his life. 

Now no question can be of deeper interest to us than 
the question how God deals with such facts as these. 
Does His economy include any law of restoration, and 
if so, what is it ? 

It is evident at first sight, that any economy of resto- 
ration must not only be based on superhuman wisdom, 
but must include superhuman compassion. And yet 
our views of divine compassion must not lead us to 
imagine that God is going to be untrue to His own 
laws, or is going to reverse their action. " Whatsoever 
a man soweth that shall he also reap," is a law which 
God does not violate in morals any more than in the 
fields. Certain physical- consequences of sin have to 
come. So do certain moral consequences. Viewed 
simply as a matter of law, the wasted years cannot be 
restored. God will not give back lost time by a miracle. 
The shadow on the dial of life will not go backward the 
smallest fraction of a degree. A man who has given 
•forty years to the service of the world or of his own 
lusts, cannot exert in the ten years which he may peni- 
tently give to God, the moral power which would have 
attached to the consecration of the whole fifty years. 

And the element of expiation only evades the difficul- 
ty. It does not meet it. Suffering is not a fair equiva- 
lent for the results of neglect or of wilful wrong. How 
contrition may affect one's moral relations to God is 



THE CAXKERED YEARS. 



289 



one thing : how it affects the results of his wrong-doing 
or idleness is quite another and a different thing. An 
ocean of tears will not give back life nor innocence. If 
you hand me money with which to relieve a woman who 
is dying of starvation, and I wilfully withhold it or for- 
get to give it, though, in my future remorse, I impov- 
erish myself and bestow all my goods to feed the poor, 
I cannot restore her to life. Repentance is a great 
power, but there are some things which repentance can- 
not do. Zacchaeus, in his honest repentance, offered 
half his goods to the poor, and fourfold restoration to 
any man whom he had falsely wronged ; but no doubt 
there were men whom Zacchaeus had wronged, who were 
in their graves, and beyond the reach of his reparation. 

On this side the truth is awful in its inflexibility. I 
pity the materialist when he comes to the question of 
repairing moral waste. I pity the positivist before the 
frantic appeal of a remorseful soul. He is as dumb as 
the Sphinx. He has to deal with forces as remorseless 
as iron propelled by steam, or as Niagara under the 
power of gravity. And it becomes evident that if there 
is any such thing as restoration in the divine economy, 
the scheme must be far wider than this strict physical 
law of equivalents. If God does not ignore the action 
of the physical law, which is none the less His law, that 
law must at least be taken up and carried somehow in 
the sweep of a larger law. 

And perhaps it is not possible to formulate that larger 
law. At any rate it is not necessary, however desirable 
it might be. All that we really want is to see, if we 
*3 



290 



THE CANKERED YEARS. 



can, how and where it touches a man standing penitent- 
ly in view of his eaten years. 

Some things on this point we may rightfully assert : 
enough, I think, to give us consolation and hope. 

First, we have the general, sweeping promise of God 
as voiced in our text : " I will restore the eaten years." 
We might fall confidently back on that alone. That 
tells us that restoration, according to a divine ideal, — 
quite possibly a different ideal from ours, certainly a 
higher ideal, — is a possibility and a fact in the divine 
economy. But we may go further. Some features of 
this process we know. For example, God turns the man 
entirely away from the thought and the work of literal 
restoration. In other words, He does not ask of him 
to make good, in the sense of a literal equivalent, the 
waste of the past. He is bidden to turn his back on the 
bare and wasted places. His concern is with the present 
and the future, not with the past. Look at David. 
There was one tract at least in his life which his own 
folly had made desolate ; a tract scorched and blasted 
with the fires of lust, and drenched with the blood of 
deliberate and cruel murder. According to the natural 
law of compensation, there was no compensation possi- 
ble. Uriah was dead. His household was polluted. 
These things could not be undone. David sees that ; 
and hence his prayer in the fifty-first Psalm has no refer- 
ence to this side of the matter, but is concerned with 
God's dealing with his own soul. " Wash me. Purge 
me. Create in me a clean heart." As for the matter of 
compensation, as for the problem of making good the 



THE CANKERED YEARS. 



291 



ruin, he must leave that all with God. He says nothing 
about it, because there is absolutely nothing to be said. 

Or Paul. So many years blasted by acts of violence 
and cruelty against the followers of Christ. How the 
transfigured face of Stephen, gazing upon the heavens 
through the shower of falling stones, must have haunted 
him as he recalled those days. And there was no calling 
Stephen back. There was no recalling the votes which 
had sent so many of God's own to an untimely grave 
or to cruel imprisonment. The marks of the scourge 
could not be washed out. I wonder if Paul did not 
think of that when the whip was laid upon his own back 
at Philippi. Paul mourned over all this, even in the 
full tide of his apostolic ministry. Even in the midst 
of one of the most wonderful of his inspired chapters, 
the old memory breaks up like a bitter spring in a fruit- 
ful garden. " I am the least of the apostles, that am 
not meet to be called an apostle because I persecuted 
the Church of God." But what then ? Nothing but 
to let all that faultful past go. It has wrought its 
sorrow, and no restoration will take that away ; but 
there is nothing for him now but to fix his eyes on the 
present and on the future ; and so he does. " By the 
grace of God," he continues, " I am what I am." " This 
one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, 
and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I 
press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling 
of God in Christ Jesus." 

Thus much, then, is clear. Whatever God may do 
with the faultful past, a penitent soul can only leave it 



292 THE CANKERED YEARS. 

in God's hands. His work now is not to make good the 
past, but to give himself to the development of his new 
life as a new creature in Christ Jesus. The self-scrutiny of 
a repentant and forgiven man ought to be directed not 
at what he has been, but at what he is. Christians often 
make a serious practical mistake here, in that they do 
not feel that they are permitted to drop the past, but 
suffer their past waste and neglect to cumber and hamper 
them in the effort to live their new life. You cannot 
live your new life and carry the old at the same time. 
Your life is in the present. That is your care to-day. 
You remember when Peter met the Lord by the lake- 
side after the resurrection. Peter had a dreadful past 
weighing on his heart. There was no taking back those 
three denials of his Lord. There was no denying that 
he had been a traitor and a coward. There was no 
blotting out the memory of that weary, care-worn face 
turned upon him from before the judgment-seat, of that 
brief look which burned into his weak, treacherous heart 
as fire into wax : and yet what is Christ's question to 
Peter? Not, " Have you loved me in these years 
past ? Have you always been true to me ? " But, 
" Dost thou love me ? If so, take my commission. 
Thou who didst fail in thy love to me, thou who didst 
betray me, but who canst say this hour, ' Thou knowest 
that I love Thee,' feed my sheep. Feed my lambs." 

Still, it may be said, this is not restoration, that a man 
should simply leave the past behind him. That is true. 
That is what I have been trying to show. But it is very 
important that the man should be in the right attitude 



THE CANKERED YEARS. 



293 



toward the restorative work, however that may operate, 
and this he cannot be without giving over the impossi- 
bilities of restoration to God. Some things he may be 
able to make good. Those we are not now concerned 
with. Much he cannot make good. He must leave it. 
God does not say, " Thou shall restore the years which 
the locust has eaten," but "/will restore them." 

We go on then to observe, as another feature of this 
restorative work, that God gives certain things which 
were forfeited in the wasted years of sin. Suppose that 
two ways lay before a traveller ; the one a bright, open 
road, in the full sunlight, with singing birds and fair 
prospects ; and the other, parallel to it, through a 
gloomy, subterranean tunnel, haunted with bats and 
serpents. Suppose he chooses the latter route for the 
time, and spends a day or two in the darkness, but 
thinks better of it, and makes his way out and up to the 
other road. He has lost time. That he cannot get 
back. Possibly he has gotten a fall or two of which he 
will carry the marks all the rest of his life. But when 
he gets into the brighter pathway, the sun is as bright 
for him as for the traveller who has never been in the 
tunnel. The birds sing as sweetly. Just so, when a 
man leaves behind him the waste of his years, he does 
not find God's love diminished. His own capacities for 
enjoying the tokens of divine love, and for making its 
gifts available may have been impaired. That is one of 
the sad results of the waste behind him ; but God's love 
is given to him unimpaired. God does not let the dark- 
ness of a man's past come up like a cloud between the 



2Q4 THE CANKERED YEARS. 

man and the outraying of His divine tenderness. The 
faultful past might, and often does, poison human affec- 
tion. Human nature forgives hesitatingly, and there is 
a background of suspicion behind reinstated confidence. 

" This world will not believe a man repents "; 

and the poet voices the feeling of the world when he 

adds : 

" Full seldom doth a man repent, or use 
Both grace and will to pluck the vicious quitch 
Of blood and custom wholly out of him, 
And make all clean, and plant himself afresh." 

Whether that be true or not, God believes in the pos- 
sibility of a genuine repentance, and frankly accepts it. 
Through such utterances as the parable of the Prodigal 
Son, and others of our Lord, we see repentance revealed 
as a factor of immense meaning in God's economy of 
restoration. That by which the world sets so little store 
and in which it is so slow to believe, is a thing which 
thrills heaven and the angels with joy. When God 
heals a man's backsliding, He loves him freely. 
There is not a promise of love, protection, sympathy, 
heaven, which is modified one jot for the penitent who 
returns after his years of waste. When the prodigal 
came home after having wasted his substance, the old 
house poured forth its best. The wardrobe was ran- 
sacked, not for a second-hand suit,. but for the best robe, 
and the table was spread with the best the larder could 
furnish. His entertainment was that of a king's son and 
not of a beggar. There is a mystery about all this which 



THE CANKERED YEARS. 295 

we cannot fathom because we cannot fathom the love 
of God. This giving a returned prodigal the best, this 
making kings and priests out of charred brands — if this be 
not restoration, I know not what to call it. It looks as 
if, while the world disbelieves and refuses the penitent, 
heaven has nothing too good for him. How the past 
waste and the eaten years are taken care of, I do not know, 
and God does not tell me. What God does with the 
sin I do not know, any more than the priest knew what 
became of the scape-goat when he turned him loose into 
the wilderness with the people's sins upon his head. I 
do know what God does with the repentant sinner, and 
that is the important thing after all. Restoration is 
included in restored sonship. 

Yet there are certain incidents on the line of actual 
restoration which are noteworthy. God has a wonderful 
power of bringing good out of evil, and of getting inter- 
est even out of the evil of wasted years. You know 
that, in manufacturing communities, large fortunes are 
sometimes made out of what is technically called " waste." 
God discerns facts and possibilities in waste which we 
cannot see, and could not be trusted to see. You all 
know the story of that man whose eloquent lips were 
sealed by death a few weeks ago.* He had sacrificed 
genius, friendship, position, to appetite. He had drunk 
the cup of degradation to the dregs. But when, after 
all those blasted years, he threw off the yoke and became 
a new man, God took that old experience of his with 



* John B. Gough. 



296 THE CANKERED YEARS. 

all its woe and degradation, and turned it as a mighty- 
engine against the sin which had so nearly unmade him. 
You know, many of you who have heard him, what a 
power in the interest of reform he made that sad story 
of his. Hundreds of drunkards whose blunted moral 
sense neither press nor pulpit nor wife nor child could 
reach, were moved by the appeal of a man who had 
been as low as the lowest of them, and yet had saved 
his manhood alive. 

Some of you remember the crowd that filled these 
seats one Sabbath morning a dozen years ago, and that 
dusky, turbaned figure in the pulpit.* Behind him were 
long years of heathenism. So many years of his life 
canker-eaten and blasted by the blight of Brahminism : 
and yet those very years had given an added power to 
his Christian ministry among his own race, and clothed 
with moving energy his appeals to us in the interest of 
pagan India. Were not the locust-eaten years restored ? 
So it often is that, in the years of absence from God, 
which must needs be desolate and barren years, a man 
is maturing and developing a line of power ; developing 
it in the interest of evil, it is true, yet becoming deft in 
wielding it. God strikes at the evil, but He saves the 
power out of the wreck, and the man carries the matured 
power over to the side of God's kingdom, and makes it 
an instrument of spiritual victory and conquest. Saul 
of Tarsus was a persecutor. Years had been eaten by 
those belittling Rabbinical puerilities, yet, after all, that 



* Narayan Sheshadri. 



THE CANKERED YEARS. 



297 



training was not wasted. The mental discipline, the 
knowledge of the deepest and subtlest Hebrew thought, 
stood him in good stead when he became a Christian 
apostle. God had made His enemies the schoolmasters 
of His chosen preacher, even as He made Egypt train 
Moses for Israel. 

I repeat, we do not and cannot know what God does 
with the irrevocable and the irremediable in men's evil 
past ; but we do know that He makes those barren and 
blasted heritages bloom again, and bring forth thirty, 
sixty, and an hundred fold. Both the Bible and Chris- 
tian history are full of the grand, fruitful work of re- 
stored men, men with large tracts of blasted years behind 
them. Those lives have become recognized powers for 
good, fresh springs in desert places. We have the record 
of David's lust and murder, but we have David's Psalms, 
the comfort and inspiration of millions of souls. We 
have Saul's persecutions, his scourgings and impris- 
onments and murders ; but we have Paul's history of 
self-devotion and Paul's Epistles. We have Moses in a 
heathen court, and Moses forty years keeping sheep 
among the rocks and thorn-bushes of Horeb ; but we 
have Moses the leader of the Exile, the lawgiver of 
Israel, the man who stood in the cleft of the rock and 
saw God's glory. God's promise of restoration to His 
penitent people, given by His prophet in this chapter, 
is no stinted or modified promise. It is as full and gen- 
erous as if the years had not been blighted. " Ye shall 
eat in plenty and be satisfied, and shall praise the name 
of the Lord your God that hath dealt wondrously with 
13* 



298 THE CANKERED YEARS. 

you : and my people shall never be ashamed. And ye 
shall know that I am in the midst of Israel." 

Ah, that is the best of all. The worst thing in the 
blighted years is that God is away from them. They 
are years in the far country away from the Father's 
house. All blight and desolation are summed up in 
absence from God. Hence the best thing in the restoration 
is the getting back to God. Renewal, fruitfulness, peace 
are not in our new resolutions, not in our turning to 
new duties ; they are in His presence, His touch upon 
us, His guidance. 

And the promise of restoration shall have a higher 
fulfilment by and by. " In God," says one, " all lost 
things are found, and they who habitually plunge them- 
selves in God and abide in Him, never become too rich. 
Nay, they find more things than they can lose." What 
thinks the traveller in the West, of the little, bare, 
scorched place where he has made his camp-fire for a 
night, as there stretches before him the illimitable ex- 
panse of the plains ? This promise is for years eaten 
by other things than sin and neglect. Many of our 
years are cankered, or so we call it, by forces over which 
we have no control — by sickness, helplessness, poverty, 
failure. Those years are not lost. Surely if God blights 
or seems to blight, we may trust Him to restore. He 
who hath torn will heal, He who hath smitten will bind 
up. " After two days will He revive us : in the third 
day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight. 
Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord, 
His going forth is prepared as the morning, and He 



THE CANKERED YEARS. 



299 



shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former 
rain unto the earth." When a field of sugar-cane is 
cut, it is a bare and unsightly object enough. One who 
did not know the conditions of growth might say, 
" That will have to be all planted over again before it 
can yield anything." But the planter merely loosens 
the soil : he plants nothing, and soon the field is green 
again, and the tall stalks wave and rustle as aforetime. 
So God cuts His child's heritage sometimes, cuts it 
close to the ground, leaving nothing but stubble, or so 
we think, but we mistake. We know not what is under 
the stubble. We know not what secret forces are mov- 
ing even now at the roots of the stubble. God knows. 
All we have to do is to tend the soil and to keep it 
loose and open to God's showers by prayer and fidelity. 
The former and the latter rain will come, and the field 
shall be green once more and rich with sweetness. 

Only let us not presume upon all this to neglect our 
heritage. Let us not be tempted by this revelation of 
God's amazing goodness and restorative power, to think 
lightly of blight or bareness. God's promise of restora- 
tion is no encouragement to presumption. It does not 
make any less terrible the blight and canker which are 
due to our neglect or waste. You have already seen 
that, even with the utmost generosity in God's restor- 
ing, with the most wonderful power to redeem what is 
squandered, there are consequences of blighted and 
wasted years, painful consequences, which, reverently 
speaking, God himself cannot evade, and which must go 
with you into the redeemed harvest-fields of the future 



300 THE CANKERED YEARS. 

on earth. Remember the significance of every day. 
Your days are either the days of God's husbandman or 
the days of the locust and the canker. You have only so 
much time. You are making the area to-day, you were 
making it yesterday, you will be making it to-morrow, 
either a waste or a harvest-field. And remember one 
other thing. Every day you are away from God, every 
day you live in refusal of Christ's offer to save you, is a 
day given to the locust and to the canker. 

God help us all ! Who of us will not find the mark of 
the canker on his years — the corroding of idleness, the 
blight of sickness, the sad traces of weakness and indis- 
cretion ? These lives of ours have been so faulty, so fit- 
ful, so unproductive. But what shall we do ? Surely 
we are not to sit down and mourn over the past ; waste 
more time, and blight larger spaces with corroding tears ; 
bestir heart and hand and brain with feverish activity to 
chase the receding past. To what purpose is this, when 
He says, " I will restore. As for thee, forget the things 
which are behind. Run with patience the race before 
thee. Look unto Jesus and not unto the past. Thou 
shalt eat in plenty and be satisfied, and shalt praise the 
name of the Lord thy God that hath dealt wondrously 
with thee, and my people shall never be ashamed." 



XX. 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD IN THE LAND OF 

THE LIVING. 

"/ had fainted unless I had believed to see the good- 
ness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

" Wait on the Lord ; be of good courage, and He 
shall strengthen thine heart : wait, L say, on the 
Lord." — Psalm xxvii. 13, 14. 

THE words " I had fainted " are not in the original. 
The sentence is a broken one, such as one utters under 
strong emotion, suggesting possibilities, but leaving the 
hearer or reader to supply them for himself. " O had I 
not believed to see the goodness of Jehovah in the land 
of the living " — and then he breaks off, and we are left 
to imagine what dreadful thing would have happened. 

Let us simply follow the suggestions of these verses 
in order. 

" Unless I had believed to see the goodness of the 

Lord." God's goodness is often a matter of faith rather 

than of sight. We are prone to take it for granted that 

God's goodness must always come into our lives like 

ripened fruit ; whereas, as a fact, it often comes into 

them like a seed which takes time to grow. " Light is 

sown for the righteous." And I think we shall find that 

the richest developments of God's goodness are of this 

character. A good purpose of His often takes time to 

(301) 



302 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



ripen. Sometimes it is long before it even appears above 
ground. Meanwhile there is the bleak, dreary field and 
the dripping rain and the hot sun. God had a purpose 
of good, and a great purpose in allowing Joseph to be 
sold as a slave into Egypt ; but the pit, and the sale to 
the Ishmaelites, and Pharaoh's dungeon did not look 
like good. As we look at those successive events, we 
are ready to say with Jacob, " All these things are against 
me "; and yet we can see now, and Jacob saw before he 
died, that the good purpose of God was ripening all the 
while, and that each succeeding calamity was really a 
stage in the growth. 

We have gotten the goodness of God in nature re- 
duced to a matter of comparative certainty, in some as- 
pects of it at least, so that the harvest, for example, is 
hardly a matter of faith. But our Lord, you remember, 
uses the attitude of the farmer in the interval between 
sowing and harvest to illustrate the proper attitude of 
His disciples toward the development of the kingdom of 
God. The farmer casts his seed into the ground, and 
then, in the interval, while the clods are still untouched 
with a shade of green, he sleeps and rises night and day, 
in full assurance that nature will do her own work in her 
own time. 

Faith in God involves and implies faith in good. The 
word "God" is "good." God is not God except He be 
good and do good. That we must assume in the very 
conception of God. And perhaps the stress of the 
doubt does not fall there. It is a good deal easier to 
Relieve a thing in the form of a statement or propo- 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



303 



sition or formula, or as an abstract fact, than it is to be- 
lieve the same thing in its practical applications. Hun- 
dreds of people pray, ' Thy will be done," and would 
say, and sincerely, that it is the best of all possible 
things that God's will should be done ; but when God's 
will puts itself into a thunderbolt which strikes straight 
down into their house or field, faith in the supreme ex- 
cellence of God's will becomes quite another matter. 
We may believe, as I have said, in the goodness of God, 
as involved in His being. It is a commonplace to us 
that God is good. It seems as though we should as 
soon think of doubting the sun in heaven. And yet 
there come times to most of us when such a doubt be- 
comes not only possible, but a fact : times when we can- 
not see the goodness of the Lord: when we cry out like 
Job, "O that I knew where I might find Him": when 
we open our arms to clasp some good, only to find them 
closing upon vacancy. The Psalmist has struck the real 
key-note here. It is not the goodness of the Lord as a 
matter of abstract faith at which we faint, it is the good- 
ness of the Lord as a matter of sight. We faint because 
we do not see His goodness. 

This fact is brought out more strongly by the next 
clause — " in the land of the living." That means the 
land which is the sphere of sight and touch ; the land 
where the goodness of God or its withdrawal concerns 
us more immediately. It is the land where not only 
you live, trying to serve God in your living, and receiv- 
ing the goodness of God with a thankful and humble 
heart, but where the wicked live in rebellion against 



304 THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 

God ; where sin, and its family of falsehoods, murders, 
cruelties, extortions, and oppressions live and thrive : 
where the purpose of God is working itself out through 
this complexity of factors known as life, slowly seeking 
an adjustment and a triumphant result out of the clash- 
ing of human wills, the conflict of selfish interests, the 
struggle between ignorance and knowledge, and between 
good and evil. It is this problem which troubles us. 
A good man is not usually disturbed about God's good- 
ness beyond this world. He takes it for granted, indeed, 
that there every cloud will be dispelled and every hard 
question settled. It is God's goodness in the land of 
the living which sometimes puzzles him. The land of 
the living meant to the Psalmist, as we see by reading 
the rest of this Psalm, hosts that encamped against 
him ; enemies and foes that pressed on to eat up his 
flesh ; the being forsaken by his nearest of kin, and at 
the mercy of false witnesses and of such as breathe out 
cruelty. In such a land as this, if a man attempts to 
live by sight only, he will inevitably be discouraged and 
beaten. Life is a problem which sense cannot resolve. 
On its face it seems constantly to contradict the good- 
ness of God. The goodness of God in the land of the 
living is the hard question which has persisted in com- 
ing to the surface from the time that men began to 
think about God. It might be comparatively easy, as I 
have said, to frame an abstract conception of a perfect 
being, and to write under it " Supremely Good," but 
goodness is not an abstract thing. Goodness takes 
shape and consistency only by contact with objects. 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



305 



Goodness as a mere abstract quality might just as well 
attach to a statue of Jove as to the living God for any 
practical significance that it has. It acquires meaning 
only as the quality exerts itself. Men define it and 
conceive it only in its active relations. That goodness 
is essentially the contradiction of sin anybody will ad- 
mit. The knotty point is, what can goodness do with 
sin ? How are the existence and energy of sin compat- 
ible with goodness ? Why sin at all where infinite good- 
ness reigns ? Once admit the existence of God, and the 
relation between God and life pushes at once to the 
front. The Epicurean got rid of the question (if he did 
get rid of it) by shutting God out of human life. Deity, 
according to him, dwelt in a remote region of the heav- 
ens, and did not concern itself with human affairs. The 
world and God had no connection any more than the 
new-born babe with the frosty peak of the Caucasus. 
Man was not linked to God by creation, for the world 
was created by the chance concourse of self-moving 
atoms. The Deist does little, if any, better. But to 
us who recognize the whole scheme of things as one, 
from the snail by the roadside and the stone on which 
he crawls, up to God upon His throne, the problem can- 
not be solved in that way. To us there cannot be a 
God and a world without links and relations between 
the two. The Pantheist does not escape the practical 
difficulty by refusing to recognize any God except the 
phenomena of matter and mind. That leaves him to 
solve the problem of this world practically by this world 
itself. Given this world as it is, and a personal God, 



3 o6 THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 

and the existence and work of evil is not an easy matter 
to resolve. The question is summed up in a passage of 
that favorite book of our childhood, " Robinson Crusoe," 
where the poor heathen Friday, on receiving his element- 
ary instruction in religion, and being told of God and 
the Evil One, asks in all simplicity why God, being all- 
powerful, did not kill the devil. Many of us have asked 
the same question — how the goodness of God is consist- 
ent with the existence and toleration of evil in the 
world, and have been tempted to faintness because we 
did not see the goodness of God in the land of the 
living. 

And yet the fact of such goodness visible- in the world 
and in human life is assumed by the Psalmist. He has 
faith in it. He believed to see it in the land of the liv- 
ing. Can we see as much ? 

In the first place, let it be observed that God does not 
throw us entirely upon faith for the testimony of His 
goodness in this present world. The goodness of God 
is seen in this land of the living. However hard we 
may find it to reconcile this fact with other facts, it is 
true that the world and human life furnish multiplied 
evidences of God's goodness which appeal to the ordi- 
nary sense. The provisions of nature, the herb for the 
service of man, the wonderful adaptations of animal and 
vegetable life to man's needs and uses in different cli- 
mates, are illustrations of this. It was something more 
than mere ingenious artifice which made the bread-fruit 
grow in the tropics and not in the northern latitudes. 
In a tropical garden I noted one day a peculiar species 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 307 

of palm, the leaves of which radiated from thick, fleshy 
masses, and on striking a pointed instrument into one 
of these masses, a stream of water spouted forth, suf- 
ficient to quench the thirst of a tired traveller. That 
tree was not made for a land where the wayfarer could 
stoop down and refresh himself at wayside-springs or at 
mountain-brooks. The foot of the camel is made for 
the desert-sands, not for European highways, and the 
reindeer is not at home in the temperate or torrid zones. 

Similarly this goodness is seen in a thousand things 
in the social and domestic life of men. There is the set- 
ting of the solitary in families, and the blessed ties which 
unite husband and wife and parent and child. There 
are the social sympathies which issue in organized char- 
ities. There too are the beneficent contact of minds, 
the evolution of thought, the provisions of the Gospel, 
and the institutions of religion. In the very constitution 
of society we may easily see infinite possibilities of good. 
The more we study natural social laws, the more clearly 
it appears that they have been ordained for man's well- 
being, with a purpose as definite and as beneficent as 
appears in the distribution of fruits and flowers and 
animals. 

When it comes to the matter of personal experience, 
there is not one of us, however hard his lot, however 
large his share of sorrows, who has not seen the goodness 
of God in his life. Life has brought blows, but it has 
also brought balsams : calamities, but also mitigations. 
Labor has been offset with rest ; tears with smiles. No 
life has been utterly bleak and barren. And for many 



3 o8 THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 

of the worst sorrows and calamities of our lives we have 
ourselves to blame. They are not due to God. They 
have come through our refusing His goodness. 

All these, I repeat, appeal to our sense. We have 
seen and been touched by the goodness of the Lord. 
These visible evidences of His goodness He has given 
in order to fortify and stimulate our faith at points 
where His dealing seems to contradict our ideas of 
goodness. He would make us all logicians to the ex- 
tent of reasoning from the seen to the unseen. He 
would entrench us in the fundamental truth that He is 
good and means good and does good ; so that when we 
sally out, as sometimes we must, into regions where we 
have to feel our way, we may always have this base of 
experience to fall back upon : so that there may always 
be roads cut by memory, and ever open behind us, lead- 
ing back to the seen and felt goodness of God in the 
land of the living. 

We must, I repeat, enter regions where we have to 
feel our way ; where we cannot see anything that looks 
like the goodness of the Lord. In these we must be- 
lieve to see, or be utterly confused and lost. If we 
once lose our hold on that first, fundamental, universal 
fact that God is good ; if we consent to believe that 
fact only so long as it shall be a matter of sight and ap- 
prehension, there is nothing for us but faintness and 
despair ; because a great many things in this world 
refuse to explain themselves : the contradictions and 
evils of society decline to furnish their own solution. 
If we are thrown simply upon facts as they stand for 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



309 



evidence of a beneficent will working among men, we 
must often say that they betoken a will the reverse of 
beneficent. A man starting out on a journey round the 
world, may look up to the blue sky with its sun and 
moon and stars, and say confidently to himself, " This sky 
spans the whole circumference which I am to traverse. 
These luminaries diffuse their light round the globe." 
Is he, then, the first time he sails into a mist, or the first 
time the blue above is hidden by black clouds, to say, 
" The sky and the light of the sun extend only so far as 
the edge of this fog or the skirts of this cloud-bank"? 
Does he not hold steadily by the fact that there is a 
sky over him with its great lights to rule the day and 
the night, whether he sees them or not ? 

Just in this steady hold lies the secret of escape from 
faintness and despair : just in this believing to see where 
we cannot see. According to the popular proverb, see- 
ing is believing. Scripture reverses the proverb. Be- 
lieving is seeing. Faith is the demonstration of things 
not seen ; and in those personal and social crises where 
everything seems going to ruin, if we have not faith we 
have nothing left. We shall faint if we do not believe. 
Because there is an earthquake shall I cease to believe 
in gravitation ? I remember a land-locked bay, which, 
from some peculiarity or other, the tide used to leave 
two-thirds bare when it ebbed. It was one of the love- 
liest spots I ever saw at high water, but one of the most 
ghastly when the tide was out. I might stand by the 
shore and look out over the dismal expanse of mud, and 
say, " The place is ruined : it never will be beautiful any 



3io 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



more." I look down into the stagnant pools, and they 
are glassy and motionless under the hot sun, and I say, 
" The tide is gone, the joy and life of the ocean come 
hither no more." Fool that I am. Out yonder in the 
ocean depths, even while I mourn, the sea is rallying, 
and gathering itself up to move upon the land. By and 
by the stagnant pools will begin to stir, and the little 
eddies to whirl, and pool to reach over to pool and to run 
into one, until soon the bay will be brimming again, 
and the mud-banks hidden and the fresh, living tide en- 
folding the rocks. There are periods of slack-water in 
the history of individuals, of churches, and of nations ; 
periods of mud and stagnation ; days and years without 
a ripple. And when the ripple begins to come, and the 
stagnation begins to be stirred, that which is the pre- 
sage of better things often makes the prospect look 
uglier than before. It takes strong souls to go through 
such periods ; believing souls, which have settled faith in 
the laws of God's tides, and which believe in the force when 
they do not see the ripple or the wave. Every time 
that the tide comes up, it washes away. the forms of 
faint-hearted men who have lain down and died because 
they could not believe in a tide which they could not 
see ; because they could not believe that God was in the 
ebb and in the slack-water, no less than in the grand in- 
flowing. It is the men who stand by the bare shores, 
saying, " Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him ! " 
who are the hope and the trust of the Church and of 
the State in the days of weariness and desolation. 

The goodness of God is a larger thing than human 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



311 



goodness. It is capable of taking on a great many forms 
which human goodness cannot assume and which human 
minds find it hard if not impossible to understand. In 
our dictionaries we do not dare to write down opposite 
the word " goodness " — " wreck, sorrow, disaster, breaking- 
up." But you know how the skillful philologist, going 
below the popular meaning of words, finds their roots 
linked with those of other words lying far remote in the 
field of human speech, and will show you how a word 
carries in its bosom a thought of which you did not so 
much as dream. God's lexicon is a puzzle to the man who 
does not come to it with the key of faith. He assigns 
to words meanings which we think belong to other and 
contrary words : and He speaks out those words with His 
own meaning ; utters them sjdlable by syllable ; and 
every syllable is a crash of thunder to the man who in- 
terprets His speech only by his own dictionary and gram- 
mar. Faith hears a voice of love through the thunder. 
To faith the word which sounds " disaster," means 
"goodness." 

Breaking-up is a not uncommon fact in the lives of 
good men and women. Occasionally they are thrown 
out of their tight, comfortable ships, and see the ships 
go to pieces, and have to cling to fragments or make 
rafts. It is hard to see goodness in such wreck as that ; 
and yet when a ship goes down at sea, the man who has 
a life-preserver or a timber thinks himself happy. The 
question is whether we can bring ourselves to think that 
God is good when He transfers us from the ship to the 
timber: whether we can stretch the word goodness to 



312 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



cover timbers and rafts and life-preservers as well as 
ships. If we have taken it for granted that God's good- 
ness means only a sound ship and a voyage compassed 
the whole way with its protections and comforts, then 
the wreck and the raft will come to us as terrible sur- 
prises. If, on the other hand, we believe in the fact of 
the goodness of the Lord, any way, ship or raft, storm or 
sunshine, sailing into port or washed ashore, we shall be 
strong-hearted and hopeful on the raft no less than on 
the ship. Only it is well that we take care how we build 
our ship to begin with. If it is to go to pieces, it is well 
that the pieces be strong ; well that we provide some- 
thing that will float when the wreck breaks up. If a 
man's life is put together with selfishness, greed, pride, 
vanity, he stands a poor chance when the structure is 
broken up. If he puts out to sea with only his money 
or his cunning or his social repute or his political or 
professional or business-standing under him, he will find 
that such timbers will not float him. They will break 
with the breaking of the ship. Gold sinks ; political 
prosperity is worm-eaten ; craft and cunning are knocked 
into splinters by the first wave. The man will go down. 
Faith, hope, love, are strong and buoyant. If a man 
has in his ship this single plank of faith, nothing can 
send him to the bottom. Life's currents will bear him 
to land alive. We freight our ships with a good many 
worthless things. It is none the less goodness because 
we do not see it as such, which compels us to throw a 
part of the cargo overboard. God does us the greatest 
of favors when He saves out of our lives only that which 



THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 



313 



is worth saving ; and sometimes He shipwrecks us for 
just this. Paul was heavily laden with rabbinical learn- 
ing and with Jewish prejudices. All that was worth sav- 
ing out of that mass of trash was such knowledge of his 
people's literature and thought as he could turn to ac- 
count in winning them over to Christ. The rest went 
overboard and sank under that single bolt which struck 
him down on the way to Damascus. A notable Rabbi 
was wrecked and broken up then and there, but a Chris- 
tian Apostle came strong and triumphant out of the 
wreck. It was a great change for Moses from the cool, 
dark halls of Egyptian temples and the society of cul- 
tured priests, to the barren solitudes of Horeb ; but Is- 
rael's leader and lawgiver lives in history, while the tem- 
ples are in ruins, and the literature of Egypt is a relic 
for learned curiosity, and the wisest of the priests and 
sages are forgotten. 

In the light of all this we can understand the exhorta- 
tions which follow in the next verse. In view of the 
truth that the goodness of God is an immutable, eternal, 
universal fact in this land of the living with all its con- 
fusion and contradiction, only one counsel is possible ; 
and that the Psalmist gives us along with a promise : 
" Wait on the Lord ! Be brave ! He shall strengthen 
thine heart." To wait on the Lord is to serve Him, as 
we speak of a servant waiting upon us. In all the con- 
fusion and sorrow we are to be constant to duty. We 
are called to serve God under all circumstances whatso- 
ever. We are to trust Him to adjust the circumstances 
to the service. Do you hold it as a mark of God's good- 
14 



314 THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 

ness that He calls and permits you to serve Him ? Then 
believe that the service is good all through. You did 
not contract to serve God only in sunshine, any more 
than a sailor engages to do duty only in fair weather. 
You are serving God, and God will take care that service 
shall be a good and a wholesome thing, both in itself and 
in its fruits, whether it be service in the dark or in the 
light, in calm or in storm. 

Waiting also includes tarrying. The servant waits on 
his Lord, but he also waits for his Lord. Remember, 
you and I are servants. It is not for us to say how fast 
God shall move, or when and in what way He shall do 
this or that for us or for society. God regulates His 
own movements. God moves at His own rate. It is 
for us to wait patiently when He delays. If He keeps 
us waiting in the dark, He knows why. If He keeps us 
standing still when we want to move, there is a sufficient 
reason for it. You and I have heard soldiers tell how, 
when a battle was raging, they were kept sometimes 
standing for hours, doing nothing except to pick up a 
wounded or dead comrade now and then, as a shot or a 
shell came over into their lines, until their impatience 
to charge grew almost into madness : but the general 
knew that the day would be won by holding that line 
in reserve. The hardest thing in the world is suspense, 
yet a servant must learn to wait as well as to labor. 

He will strengthen thine heart. Not always your 
hands. " Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and 
the young men shall utterly fail." Not your position. 
That may be swept away from under you. But your 



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